IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aza/rmfi00/y2015v8i2p147-152.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Facing the interest rate challenge: A key risk management issue for insurers

Author

Listed:
  • Frey, Astrid

Abstract

Interest rate risk is a key risk management challenge for life insurers. Life savings business is most exposed to interest rate changes, especially when the policies contain fixed, long-term guarantees. Managing interest rate risk via duration matching of assets and liabilities is complicated by various factors, including the lack of securities with very long duration and policy holder behaviour, which is hard to predict. Product features are a key determinant of interest rate sensitivity. As such, product design is the first step in interest rate risk management. Rather than hoping for interest rates to reverse their downtrend, which will not provide any immediate relief, insurers should aim to reduce the interest rate risk arising from the savings policies offered by adjusting the embedded guarantees and options.

Suggested Citation

  • Frey, Astrid, 2015. "Facing the interest rate challenge: A key risk management issue for insurers," Journal of Risk Management in Financial Institutions, Henry Stewart Publications, vol. 8(2), pages 147-152, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:aza:rmfi00:y:2015:v:8:i:2:p:147-152
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://hstalks.com/article/367/download/
    Download Restriction: Requires a paid subscription for full access.
    File URL: https://hstalks.com/article/367/
    Download Restriction: Requires a paid subscription for full access.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    interest rates; insurance industry; product design; guarantees; policy holder behaviour; savings business;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G2 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services
    • E5 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aza:rmfi00:y:2015:v:8:i:2:p:147-152. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Henry Stewart Talks (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.