Author: Aaron Woolner
It could take decades for the new legislation to have any discernible impact on mortality.
IORP II and DORA making extra work for Irish pension schemes, but activity could soon pick up.
US life expectancy gap to other developed countries has widened in the past two years.
The C$7.8bn worth of deals struck in Canada’s pension risk transfer (PRT) market in 2023 were spread across 190 sponsors, giving an average deal size of roughly C$40m. While larger deals are not unheard of, the market is concentrated among small and medium sized entities. Canadian pension scheme sponsors are showing a consistent appetite for PRT deals. Data from actuarial consultants Ecklers shows the market hovered around the C$8bn mark for three years in a row and according to Mary Kate Archibald, Principal at Ecklers, 2024 could deliver even bigger numbers. “What we’re hearing from the insurers is that 2024…
The 2015 Paris Agreement targeted a long-term goal to keep the rise in global surface temperature to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels – but early signs are of progress on achieving these targets are not great. Scientists at the EU’s Copernicus climate monitoring service reported at the start of September that the Northern Hemisphere summer was the hottest since records began, beating a record only set in 2023. Anthropogenic global heating will have a direct impact on life expectancy according to a study published by The Lancet a few days earlier. Part of the publication’s Countdown initiative, which tracks…
The link between geography and life expectancy can be traced back to the seventeenth century with the publication of John Graunt’s, ‘Natural and Political Observations…Made upon the Bills of Mortality’ in 1662, which established different levels of mortality for rural and city dwellers. The bills of mortality referred to by Graunt were weekly lists of parish birth and death records which had been published in England since the mid-sixteenth century, but today’s researchers have a more comprehensive set of tools. The Longevity Index for England (LIFE Index), developed by a team led by Professor Andrew Cairns of Heriot-Watt University, uses…
Germany’s total pension assets are touching €730bn. But even with revised accounting standards, which explicitly brought pension liabilities onto corporate balance sheets, being introduced in the mid-noughties, activity in the country’s pension risk transfer (PRT) market has been muted. Magnus Schmagold, Partner at German pension buy-out firm Funding Solutions, which has struck seven PRT deals worth a collective €324m since it was launched in 2018, says that this is about to change. Schmagold says that in 2024 the firm has had two or three times the number of discussions around PRT transactions than in previous years, and that with transaction…
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the world’s leading cause of death, accounting for nearly 18 million lives annually, or 33% of the total, well ahead of cancers which are the next highest cause of mortality (17%), according to Our World in Data. The data are also clear that CVD impacts men and women in different ways, with an overall lower prevalence of coronary disease among women, who typically develop heart problems at older ages – the average age for a first heart attack in men is 65, compared with 72 for women, according to Harvard Medical School. The picture was more…
The US Department of Labor (DOL) has concluded its review of the regulatory framework for the pension risk transfer (PRT) market and decided not to take any action at the moment, but it has left the door open for future rule changes. At the end of June, the DOL’s Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) issued a report to Congress on the thirty year old Interpretive Bulletin 95-1 (IB 95-1) in which it said it was not ‘prepared at this time to propose amendments’. The EBSA report explicitly addressed concerns from some market participants that the greater use of illiquid investments,…
The UK’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) will introduce stress testing for insurers’ exposure to funded reinsurance (funded re) transactions for the first time in 2025. The UK regulator first signaled its concerns over the use of this type of reinsurance treaty in June 2023 when it warned this structure could leave carriers exposed in stressed markets. Speaking at an industry conference in April, Lisa Leaman, Head of Insurance Supervision at the PRA, said that the 2025 Life Insurance Stress Test (LIST), due to be published in June, would outline the proposed funded re stress tests. Funded re is the transfer of…