Our insight into the changing industry landscape and our superior financial-modeling capabilities have made Milliman the premier life insurance and annuity product-development consultant.
We work with insurance companies of all sizes, reinsurers, product distributors, and other financial institutions. Milliman assists companies interested in launching into new markets or prepares them to introduce new products to existing markets. We serve as an outsourced product-development department for some clients, while for others we impart the knowledge needed to create new-generation products in-house.
Strategy in new product design
We can assess the regulatory environment and assist in pricing and product design for a wide range of life and annuity products. We have expertise in the full spectrum of products from pre-need and final expense products to accumulation products, including indexed and variable life insurance products.
Our consultants work with the full range of marketing concepts from direct sales to the advanced sales market for highly affluent customers. We have priced and designed many of the popular secondary guarantee universal life products and have assisted companies in understanding complex reserve calculation.
During the past two years, we have executed more than a dozen projects involving either life insurance/long-term care or annuity/long-term care combinations. Because Milliman also has a large healthcare industry practice, we're able to offer clients unique expertise on both the insurance and healthcare sides of these increasingly popular products.
One insurance company client, a major writer of both life insurance and long-term care products, had two separate staffs working on the two policy types, but staffing limitations and internal coordination issues between the two divisions made developing combination plans a challenge. Milliman helped the company create a new division focused on combination products and shaped the specifications for the first several products, including contract drafting, claim cost development, financial modeling, and pricing, using MG-ALFA®. Finally, Milliman's compliance practice successfully handled the state filings.
At the forefront of industry changes
Milliman works on emerging issues, such as:
- living benefits
- special or secondary guarantees
- indexed-annuity products
- the switch to a principles-based approach to reserves and risk-based capital
On this last point, Milliman experts are actively involved in the American Academy of Actuaries life insurance industry work group for this sophisticated reserve-calculation technique. We not only advise our clients on how to prepare for the new methodology, but we're working to establish industry standards and new financial-modeling systems for principles-based reserves.
