A survey of valuation issues for hybrid retirement income scheme products

So-called variable annuity products which provide certain guaranteed minimum benefits are popular in the United States and Europe but are only in their infancy in Australia. We consider hybrid products with minimum withdrawal rates guaranteed for a fixed term or for life and the financial derivatives embedded in them. A capital markets style model can be used to value the product issuer’s liability under the contract and measure their exposure to equity prices, interest rates, volatility and mortality risk. We survey recent literature for analysis of the valuation challenge faced by product issuers. We find that the guarantees generate material exposure for the issuers and that model based valuation can be informative for a dynamic hedging strategy or to derive risk sensitive measures of required capital and reserves