Hosts

The Eighth International Longevity Risk and Capital Markets Conference is hosted by the University of Waterloo Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science in the Faculty of Mathematics, the Waterloo Research Institute in Insurance, Securities & Quantitative Finance, and the Pensions Institute at Cass Business School, City University London.

Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science

The Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science in the University of Waterloo's Faculty of Mathematics is among the top academic units for statistical and actuarial science in the worldand is home to more than 40 research active full-time faculty members. It offers a vibrant research environment for a wide range of areas including foundations of statistics, analysis of longitudinal and life history data, computational inference, finance, risk management, ruin theory, survey methods, industrial statistics, and interdisciplinary collaborative work. The Department is also home to over 900 undergraduate students and about 150 graduate students in programs including Actuarial Science, Biostatistics, Quantitative Finance, Statistics, and Statistics-Computing.

WatRISQ

The Waterloo Research Institute in Insurance, Securities and Quantitative Finance - is a world-class centre in financial risk management, that brings together a strong research team of specialists in actuarial science, computer science, optimization, econometrics, finance and statistics to develop global solutions for financial risk management. It promotes excellence in the science and practice of risk management through research, consulting and world-wide seminars and workshops and conferences.

WatRISQ works with industry and government partners to develop effective quantitative solutions in risk management and finance. Seminars and presentations by WatRISQ experts are organized on a regular basis both in Waterloo and around the world. They provide an opportunity to share new research with academic and practitioner colleagues.

A unique centre for research and advanced training in quantitative finance and risk management at the University of Waterloo, WatRISQ coordinates the University's related research activities in finance, mathematics, scientific computing and actuarial science. WatRISQ is directed by Thomas F. Coleman, Ophelia Lazaridis University Research Chair.

Over 40 faculty members and their graduate students are associated with the Institute. Research strengths include:

Computational finance

• Pricing and hedging numerical PDEs for finance
• Portfolio optimization
• Monte Carlo type methods
• High-performance and parallel computing techniques

Risk management

• Long term investment models
• Pricing and hedging of investment guarantee products
• Credit risk modeling
• Operational risk

Insurance and actuarial science

• Mortality and longevity risk
• Pension plans
• Risk theory

Financial Econometrics

• Volatility modelling
• Empirical asset pricing
• Forecasting

Pensions Institute

The objectives of the Pensions Institute are:

• to undertake high quality research in all fields related to pensions
• to communicate the results of that research to the academic and practitioner community
• to establish an international network of pensions researchers from a variety of disciplines
• to provide expert independent advice to the pensions industry and government.

We take a fully multidisciplinary approach. For the first time disciplines such as economics, finance, insurance, and actuarial science through to accounting, corporate governance, law and regulation have been brought together in order to enhance strategic thinking, research and teaching in pensions. As the first and only UK academic research centre focused entirely on pensions, the Pensions Institute unites some of the world's leading experts in these fields in order to offer an integrated approach to the complex problems that arise in this field. The Pensions Institute undertakes research in a wide range of fields, including:

• Pension microeconomics
  The economics of individual and corporate pension planning, long term savings and retirement decisions.
• Pension fund management and performance
  The investment management and investment performance of occupational and personal pension schemes.
• Pension funding and valuations
  The actuarial and insurance issues related to pension schemes, including risk management, asset liability management, funding, scheme design, annuities, and guarantees.
• Pension law and regulation
  The legal aspects of pension schemes and pension fund management.
• Pension accounting, taxation and administration
  The operational aspects of running pension schemes.
• Marketing
  The practice and ethics of selling group and individual pension products.
• Macroeconomics of pensions
  The implications of aggregate pension savings and the impact of the size and maturity of pension funds on other sectors of the economy (e.g. corporate, public and international sectors).
• Public policy
  Domestic and EU social policy towards pension provision and other employee benefits in the light of factors such as the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty and the demographic developments in Europe and other countries. Research disseminated by the Pensions Institute may include views on policy but the Pensions Institute itself takes no institutional policy positions.