Description: The IFRS Foundation’s establishment of the International Sustainability Standards Board is a major step toward achieving relevant, decision-useful sustainability information for market participants that is comparable across industries and jurisdictions.

Description: Recent events and commentary from a member of the JRMS council.

Description: This article highlights 13 attributes shared by various groups of companies that landed in trouble. The companies are identified, and the attributes are described.

Description: This article serves as a Solvency II primer by first introducing the Solvency II framework and then identifying several implementation issues that are still being resolved.

Description: Risk based pricing addresses some of the shortcomings of traditional pricing methods by providing a framework for understanding the tradeoffs between shareholder risks and rewards using a robust, transparent and objective economic methodology that is consistent across products.

Description: This article talks about the role that models played in the subprime meltdown and the subsequent crisis in the financial markets in general. The models failed to provide information about the magnitude of potential 'black swans'. Extreme Value Theory [EVT] is described as a potential solution to this error.

Description: The editors introduce the articles in this issue of the newsletter.

Description: The editor of the Risk Management newsletter summarizes the articles in this issue which cover Enterprise Risk Management, Systemic Risk and Variable Annuities.

Description: The IFRS Foundation’s establishment of the International Sustainability Standards Board is a major step toward achieving relevant, decision-useful sustainability information for market participants that is comparable across industries and jurisdictions.

Description: In this article, we summarize inflationary factors that may result in a sharp increase in interest rates and implications for life insurer convexity risk exposure, most notably to dynamic policyholder lapsation. We further provide insights into potential ALM strategies to mitigate this convexity risk. Due to the prolonged low-interest rate environment and low minimum interest rate guarantees offered to policyholders, liability convexity is higher than prior historical periods, which results in life insurers’ ALM positions being extremely vulnerable to short-term interest rate spikes. Convexity mismatches cause issues for life insurers under both rising and declining interest rate scenarios. This means that life insurers are not compensated for taking convexity risk and, therefore, convexity matching should always be considered in the asset optimization process. There are mixed signals from policymakers and financial markets regarding potential inflationary and sharply rising interest rate scenarios. The key takeaway is that life insurers are not compensated for taking convexity risk and it is the right time for insurers to review convexity exposure. There are different approaches available to mitigate convexity exposure through rebalancing of asset positions and hedges within each life insurer’s risk limits.