Version 1: Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to: recognize the importance of solvency and profitability and how they are measured in an insurance company context; understand the economic and financial implications of risk/return trade-off and the trade-off between current profit and long-term growth; identify the factors insurers must consider when developing and pricing products to ensure that products are both profitable and competitive in the financial services marketplace; understand and use asset-share models to price products profitably; explain the effects of new business strain on reserves and capital; understand the fundamentals of how capital management and asset/liability management are applied in insurance companies; apply various tools for monitoring financial performance and understand the role of rating agencies and regulations in solvency surveillance; understand the complexity of the financial underpinnings of a life and health insurance company; and describe the importance of expense control and revenue growth to a company's long-term success and what today's companies are doing in these areas. Version 2: Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to: recognize the importance of solvency and profitability and how they are measured; understand the risk-return tradeoff in finance; identify factors insurers consider when designing life insurance and annuity products; use an asset-share model to gain greater understanding of product profitability; explain the effects of surplus strain on insurers; explain how mortality affects life insurance and annuity benefit costs; describe how company expenses affect product design and company profitability; describe approaches insurance companies use for managing their capital; and explain how insurance companies raise new capital from outside of the company. Version 3: Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to: explain the importance of solvency and profitability and how they are measured in an insurance company context; describe the complex area of risk management for life insurance companies, from the typical risks that insurers face to the practices of asset-liability management (ALM) and enterprise risk management (ERM); explain how company expenses affect product design and company profitability and describe the importance of expense control; describe how insurers use financial modeling to support their ongoing profitability and explain the tools that insurers use financial modeling to support their ongoing profitability and explain the tools that insurers use to interpret the results of financial modeling; describe the basic steps of the product development process and identify the factors that insurers must consider when designing life insurance and annuity products; describe the basic concepts that apply to the time value of money and be able to perform a variety of calculations using these concepts; explain how mortality affects life insurance and annuity benefit costs; and describe the benefits provided by life insurance and annuity products and explain how these benefits must be factored into every product design.