Michael McDonald

Since entering the life insurance industry in 2003, Michael’s focus has been on the valuation and risk management of insurance products. Michael began his career in the United States, working for two major insurance carriers. For the last 16 years, Michael worked as an AXIS modeling consultant with expertise in life and health insurance products that include annuities, traditional life, disability, long-term care, and universal life, as well as various reinsurance blocks. In addition to liability models, Michael also has expertise in modeling assets and reinvestment strategies.

Some of his accomplishments include:

• Leading VM-21, LDTI and IFRS 17 project work streams for various clients.
• Working with a large global reinsurer in developing and implementing their Model Transformation Initiative for their US operations.
• Leading work stream in Actuarial System Transformation for a global insurer to improve governance, flexibility and efficiency of E2E reporting process.
• Implementing best practices valuation framework for a mid-sized Canadian insurer.
• Converting valuation models to AXIS for various lines of business: fixed/variable/indexed annuities, traditional life, long-term care, universal life and equity index annuity.
• Building spot checking spreadsheets for clients that replicated projection and reserve calculations (US GAAP/US Stat) from their production models.
• Developing best practices change management protocol related to AXIS models development.
• Developing nested stochastic model that projected hedge cash flows and was a key tool in analyzing hedge effectiveness for a US insurer.