March 2019

Pension Risk Transfer Volume Blows Past Forecasts

U.S. life insurers took over more pension responsibility than they might have expected in 2018. Full-year sales of group annuities used to transfer pension risk increased to about $26 billion in 2018, up 15% from the total for 2017, according to new issuer survey data from the LIMRA Secure Retirement Institute. In June, Wayne Daniel, head of U.S. pensions at MetLife, predicted pension plan sponsors might use group annuities to transfer about $20 billion in pension risk in 2018....

Francisco Murillo: “Si no se aprueba la reforma, en cuatro años tendremos un 40% más de pensionados, con pensiones similares a las actuales”

El CEO de Sura Asset Management Chile sostiene que aumentar la cotización hasta un 18% requerirá de una transitoriedad. Además, comenta que es necesario desarrollar el mercado laboral para aquellos pensionados en condiciones de trabajar. “El taxímetro sigue corriendo, y mientras antes la gente empieza a ahorrar, más rápido se resuelve el problema”. Así de tajante se muestra Francisco Murillo, CEO de Sura Asset Management Chile, al momento de referirse a la reforma previsional que está siendo discutida en el...

Principal Financial close to Wells Fargo retirement unit acquisition-sources

Principal Financial Group Inc is in advanced talks to acquire Wells Fargo & Co’s retirement plan services business, in a deal that could exceed $1 billion, people familiar with the matter said on Sunday. Wells Fargo has been seeking to streamline its business as it grapples with the fallout of customer abuse scandals. The bank is prohibited from growing in size after the Federal Reserve slapped it with an unprecedented asset cap in February 2018, citing “widespread consumer abuses and...

How CPPIB is tapping ‘alternative data’ to refine its investment processes

CPPIB has assembled a team to experiment with different kinds of information in making longer-term investment decisions There was a time when the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board didn’t even make “alternative” investments. Now, Canada’s biggest pension fund says it is sifting through “alternative” forms of data to try to improve its investment decisions. CPPIB has assembled what it calls a “data-driven edge” team, a small group of investors and data scientists that are experimenting with different kinds of information in...

Public Pensions And Social Trust

So it seems that I hit the one-year mark of my writing on retirement at this platform, and have still not managed to address some of the topics I wanted to discuss, in particular, questions of what pensions look like abroad and what we can learn from them.  But right now I find myself thinking about international comparisons in another way, around the question of social trust. Round about a year ago, Megan McArdle, formerly a Bloomberg columnist and now writing at...

Actuarial Finance: Derivatives, Quantitative Models and Risk Management

By Mathieu Boudreault, Jean-Francois RenaudA Drs. Boudreault and Renaud answer the need for a clear, application-oriented guide to the growing field of actuarial finance with this volume, which focuses on the mathematical models and techniques used in actuarial finance for the pricing and hedging of actuarial liabilities exposed to financial markets and other contingencies. With roots in modern financial mathematics, actuarial finance presents unique challenges due to the long-term nature of insurance liabilities, the presence of mortality or other contingencies...

Global Microscope 2018: The Enabling Environment for Financial Inclusion

By Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) The 2018 Global Microscope provides a unique insight into the leading practices that governments and regulators are adopting to channel the digital revolution of financial services into greater levels of financial inclusion. It sets a model for an enabling environment for financial inclusion across five domains: 1. Government and Policy Support; 2. Stability and Integrity; 3. Products and Outlets; 4. Consumer Protection; and 5. Infrastructure. Developed through expert consultation, the five-part model framework represents the...

The Feasibility of Reverse Mortgages in Japan

By Richard K. Green (University of Southern California - Lusk Center for Real Estate) & Linna Zhu (USC Sol Price School of Public Policy) This paper examines the feasibility of reverse mortgages in Japan by utilizing stochastic modeling to characterize the movements of three stochastic variables—interest rates, property values and mortality—underpinning the value of reverse mortgages. We use the yield curve to forecast future interest rates, taking into account the interest arbitrage condition and the term premium. We employ hedonic...

Defined Contribution Pension Plans: Who Has Seen the Risk?

By Peter Forsyth (University of Waterloo - David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science) & Kenneth R. Vetzal (University of Waterloo) The trend towards eliminating defined benefit (DB) pension plans in favor of defined contribution (DC) plans implies that increasing numbers of pension plan participants will bear the risk that final realized portfolio values may be insufficient to fund desired retirement cash flows. We compare the outcomes of various asset allocation strategies for a typical DC plan investor. The strategies...

Population Aging, Health Care, and Fiscal Policy Reform: The Challenges for Japan

By Minchung Hsu (National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS)) & Tomoaki Yamada (Meiji University - School of Commerce) We construct a transition analysis based on a general equilibrium life‐cycle model to investigate the effects of aging, and we evaluate various policy alternatives designed to lessen the negative influence of aging. In particular, we analyze reforms of insurance benefits and tax financing tools that were recently the focus of a great amount of attention and debate in Japan because of...