Canada Life Reinsurance
About Canada Life
Canada Life Reinsurance encompasses the reinsurance operations of Great-West Lifeco, one of the largest financial companies in North America with over $19B of equity and over $700B of assets under administration.
Canada Life Reinsurance offers reinsurance products throughout the United States and Europe through subsidiaries in the U.S., Barbados, and Ireland. We are a top 10 reinsurer of traditional life insurance in the U.S., and a leader in providing structured financial reinsurance solutions throughout the U.S. and Europe.
My Responsibilities
I interned at Canada Life for 13 weeks. For the majority of the internship, I was in charge of the market research. We wanted to see where the new business was in the market by using the Schedule S report. Every company is required to report their reinsurance deals on Schedule S. This report showed the net amount at risk at the end of the year. For our list of target companies, I pulled their report from the AM Best database for 2013 and 2012. I looked at the net amount at risk at the end of 2013 and 2012. After pulling all the target companies data together, I used an assumed lapse rate for each of the top reinsurance companies. The goal was to try an match the numbers from the Munich survey, which list how much new business each reinsurance company received in 2013. This allowed us to see that the carrier ABC did new business with XYZ reinsurance company and how much.
Once I was finished this project, I had the opportunity to work with the pricing team, which was more traditional actuarial work. I assisted on coming up with the initial quote for a disability reinsurance block. I created multiple spreadsheets to calculate the actuarial present value of the future benefits for policyholders on disability.
Related to my studies
In terms of actuarial science, this internship was an excellent experience and compliments the skills I learned in class. I learned a lot about reinsurance and the life insurance market. Furthermore, I used the formulas from Modeling I and II to find the actuarial present value of the future benefits for disabled policyholders. We assumed that anyone on disability for more than 5 years were on long term disability and will not recover. I treated the benefits as a life annuity. For the disabled policyholders who were disabled for less than 5 years, I solved for P-tau (the probability of not dying and not recovering) to solve for their actuarial present value.
As for relating to my coursework in management information systems, this internship related to the Data Analytic class. During the market research project, after I received that Schedule S report, I needed to transform the data into something meaningful. Furthermore, the final project that I handed in was a pivot table. This allows them to easily see who is in the carrier’s reinsurance pool. The reinsurance pool can be viewed as market segments. A carrier will have multiple reinsurers for their company to lessen the risk. We wanted to see which reinsurers were in these pools in order to see what our competitors are doing.