Life Risk News: Volume 1, Issue 3, July 2022
The pension risk transfer market in the United Kingdom is more than a decade old but in its early years, growth was sluggish. Recently, however, the market has shown signs of accelerating growth, and a new development promises to further propel the market. Life Risk News spoke to James Mullins, Partner and Head of Risk Transfer Solutions at Hymans Robertson, and Ashu Bhargava, Senior Actuary and Head of Clients at Clara Pensions, for this month’s cover story, UK Pension Risk Transfer Market Just Getting Started.
The life settlement market is even older than the pension risk transfer one and can trace its roots back to 1911 with the Grigsby vs Russell case. The market in its current form, however, is approximately two decades old, but growth is anaemic. Life Risk News spoke to Rob Haynie, Owner and Managing Director of Life Insurance Settlements Inc., and Steven Shapiro, President and CEO at Q Capital Strategies, for Life Settlement Market Still Held Back By Lack of Awareness.
Over the years we have witnessed the successful commoditisation of several risks, including credit risk, interest rate risk and property catastrophe risk, opening up their trade to capital markets investors. Similar commoditisation of longevity risk has been slow to take off, despite many seeing a significant need for more risk takers in the market to boost capacity to service the world-wide c$80tr of longevity-linked liabilities. Erik Pickett, Actuary and Chief Content Office at Club Vita, reviews a recent panel at ELSA’s Life ILS conference in May in a commentary piece, If Longevity Risk is an Asset Class, How Do We Make It More Tradeable?
Each month on Life Risk News, we run a poll, asking our readers for their views on a hot topic in the life risk industry. Last month, we wanted to know, What Is the Greatest Barrier to Increasing the Number of Life Risk Transactions? Our readers were clear in what they thought the reason is.
The life settlement industry has had to endure its fair share of naysayers down the years and misconceptions about the asset class remain to this day. Life Equity CEO, and ELSA Chair Scott Willkomm, identifies some of these misconceptions and addresses them in a commentary piece, Myths About the Life Settlement Industry.
Life settlement investors don’t buy a life insurance policy without the data and analysis support of a life expectancy analytics firm. Life Risk News spoke to Chris Conway, Chief Development Officer at ISC Services, to learn more about how firms like his are adapting and changing to better model longevity risk for their clients for this month’s Q&A.
Insurtech is a buzzword in venture capital circles and has been for some time. However, most of the activity is in the property and casualty side of the insurance world. Life Risk News spoke to Brian Casey, Partner and Co-Chair of Regulatory & Transactional Insurance Practice Group at Locke Lord and Tom Scales, Senior Analyst at research and advisory firm Celent, to learn more about trends in the life insurance-specific insurtech world in Insurtech Yet To Significantly Impact Life Insurance Market but Change Is Coming.
As always, if you’re interested in getting in touch, whether that’s with an idea for a topic that you’d like to see covered, or just to offer some feedback, please do so at [email protected] or send a note to the team at [email protected]. In the meantime, on behalf of ELSA, we hope you enjoy this third issue of Life Risk News; click the link below to download the PDF magazine.
Greg Winterton, Contributing Editor, Life Risk News
