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Variable Annuity (VA) products expose insurance companies to considerable risk because of the guarantees they provide to buyers of these products. Managing and hedging these risks requires insurers to find the value of key risk metrics for a large portfolio of VA products. In practice, many companies rely on nested Monte Carlo (MC) simulations to find key risk metrics. MC simulations are computationally demanding, forcing insurance companies to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in computational infrastructure per year. Moreover, existing academic methodologies are focused on fair valuation of a single VA contract, exploiting ideas in option theory and regression. In most cases, the computational complexity of these methods surpasses the computational requirements of MC simulations. Therefore, academic methodologies cannot scale well to large portfolios of VA contracts. In this paper, we present a framework for valuing such portfolios based on spatial interpolation. We provide a comprehensive study of this framework and compare existing interpolation schemes. Our numerical results show superior performance, in terms of both computational efficiency and accuracy, for these methods compared to nested MC simulations. We also present insights into the challenge of finding an effective interpolation scheme in this framework, and suggest guidelines that help us build a fully automated scheme that is efficient and accurate.

As part of the new regulatory framework of Solvency II, introduced by the European Union, insurance companies are required to monitor their solvency by computing a key risk metric called the Solvency Capital Requirement (SCR). The official description of the SCR is not rigorous and has lead researchers to develop their own mathematical frameworks for calculation of the SCR. These frameworks are complex and are difficult to implement. Recently, Bauer et al. suggested a nested Monte Carlo (MC) simulation framework to calculate the SCR. But the proposed MC framework is computationally expensive even for a simple insurance product. In this paper, we propose incorporating a neural network approach into the nested simulation framework to significantly reduce the computational complexity in the calculation. We study the performance of our neural network approach in estimating the SCR for a large portfolio of an important class of insurance products called Variable Annuities (VAs). Our experiments show that the proposed neural network approach is both efficient and accurate.

Managing and hedging the risks associated with Variable Annuity (VA) products require intraday valuation of key risk metrics for these products. The complex structure of VA products and computational complexity of their accurate evaluation have compelled insurance companies to adopt Monte Carlo (MC) simulations to value their large portfolios of VA products. Because the MC simulations are computationally demanding, especially for intraday valuations, insurance companies need more efficient valuation techniques. Recently, a framework based on traditional spatial interpolation techniques has been proposed that can significantly decrease the computational complexity of MC simulation (Gan and Lin, 2015). However, traditional interpolation techniques require the definition of a distance function that can significantly impact their accuracy. Moreover, none of the traditional spatial interpolation techniques provide all of the key properties of accuracy, efficiency, and granularity (Hejazi et al., 2015). In this paper, we present a neural network approach for the spatial interpolation framework that affords an efficient way to find an effective distance function. The proposed approach is accurate, efficient, and provides an accurate granular view of the input portfolio. Our numerical experiments illustrate the superiority of the performance of the proposed neural network approach compared to the traditional spatial interpolation schemes.