Here is the headline from a piece in the February 2017 edition of The Actuary magazine:

I’m not so sure about the ‘terminal decline’ status of with-profits funds. In fact, I’d go further: I expect to see a resurgence in with-profits business within financial services over the medium term. The challenge will be finding enough actuarial resources to manage it.

With-profits is a useful label for the actuarial profession. It immediately conveys the fundamental nature of the business in question. It infers an estate, discretionary bonus distributions, policyholders’ reasonable expectations, risk management, capital adequacy and so forth. While very few new with profits insurance policies are being written now, there is an obviously similar financial asset that the community has embraced, both by direct investment and indirect investment in a superannuation fund: listed equity. Continue reading →