In the following example, we illustrate, step by step, how to identify representative risk classes and obtain the relevant data for tables B3 and B3.1 of the data request of the life underwriting risk comparative study.

This process shall be performed starting from a database of policies, however it could be approximated by performing it at model point level, provided that the undertaking has information about the age, sex and country of the underlying contracts. Any approximations shall be reported in the template G1.

For that purpose, let’s consider a fictitious undertaking with a portfolio of 10000 policies that has the following information on its policies: sex, age, country and qx, where qx is the first year of projection of the BE mortality assumption. The qx below do not reflect real best estimate probability of deaths and were randomly generated for the sole purpose of this illustrative example.

The process starts from an extract of the undertaking’s database that consists in all the policies (or model points) in its portfolio covered by the internal model and the variables needed to fill-in the table B3:

Of these 10000 policies, the undertaking needs to extract the policies related to insured people aged 0, 20, 40, 50, 65, and 80, as required by the technical specifications for tables B3 and B3.1.

In our example, this results in the extraction of a subset of 551 policies as illustrated in the table below which shows the number of policies extracted for each of the combination of segmentation variables:

For example, the policies corresponding to the combination “female, 20, D” are:

Then, for each combination of segmentation variables, the undertaking needs to extract the 5th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 95th percentiles of qx.

In our example, we obtain the following table:

sex age country risk_class qx
female 20 D risk_class_5 0.0128168
female 20 D risk_class_25 0.0145168
female 20 D risk_class_50 0.0289168
female 20 D risk_class_75 0.0440168
female 20 D risk_class_95 0.0569168

For the combinations of sex, age and country with less than 5 policies, the same policy will be representative of multiple risk classes.

In our example, the following combination comprises less than 5 policies:

sex age country number_policies
female 50 E 4

.

Therefore, for this combination, the same probabilities are assigned to different risk classes. This is illustrated in the table below:

sex age country risk_class qx
female 50 E risk_class_5 0.0124995
female 50 E risk_class_25 0.0124995
female 50 E risk_class_50 0.0171995
female 50 E risk_class_75 0.0443995
female 50 E risk_class_95 0.0497995

Finally, using the qx obtained for each risk class, the undertaking is able to identify the policies that are representative of every risk class from the original database. The identified representative policies/model points shall be used for reference also to provide data for table B3.1. In fact, in the B3.1 table undertakings shall provide the internal model projections for two key risk drivers of biometric risk, namely the probability of death and life expectancy related to each identified representative policies/model points

In our example, for the group “female, 20, D” the final policy IDs are:

sex age country risk_class qx policy_id
female 20 D risk_class_5 0.0128168 8224
female 20 D risk_class_25 0.0145168 1445
female 20 D risk_class_50 0.0289168 8903
female 20 D risk_class_75 0.0440168 2851
female 20 D risk_class_95 0.0569168 6757

While for the group with less than 5 policies, the list is:

sex age country risk_class qx policy_id
female 50 E risk_class_5 0.0124995 5793
female 50 E risk_class_25 0.0124995 5793
female 50 E risk_class_50 0.0171995 1683
female 50 E risk_class_75 0.0443995 1157
female 50 E risk_class_95 0.0497995 5726

The complete list of policies for each combination of age, sex, country and risk class is displayed in the table below.