The Journal

Insights from the analytics desk.

Research, market commentary, and technical deep-dives on life insurance analytics, longevity modeling, and the settlement markets.

Featured · Market Analysis

The 2026 Life Settlement Market: Where Pricing Models Diverge

Our analysis of 12,000 recent policy valuations reveals a widening gap between traditional actuarial pricing and ML-driven longevity models — and what that spread means for institutional buyers in the year ahead.

June 4, 20266 min read
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Latest Research & Commentary

Policy Management

The Hidden Ledger: Why Carriers Make Flexible Premiums Impossible to Model

Modern universal life policies hide the one number that decides whether they stay in force. Here's how no-lapse guarantees and shadow accounts obscure a policy's true mechanics — and how we see through them.

June 30, 20267 min read
Policy Management

Why Every Inforce Policy Needs an Annual Review

A life insurance policy is not a set-it-and-forget-it asset. Health, finances, and the policy's own mechanics all drift over time — and the owners who review and adjust every year are the ones whose coverage is still there when it's needed.

June 24, 20267 min read
Policy Management

What Is an Inforce Illustration, and How Do You Get One?

An inforce illustration is the single best tool for seeing how a life insurance policy is actually performing and where it's headed — yet most owners have never requested one. Here's what it shows, why it matters, and how to order it.

June 18, 20266 min read
Risk Modeling

Introducing VACR: The Volatility-Adjusted Crediting Rate

An IUL illustrated at a flat 7.5% isn't really a 7.5% policy. VACR is the metric we built to express what an indexed crediting assumption is actually worth once volatility and moving caps are accounted for.

June 13, 20267 min read
Risk Modeling

From One Illustration to 10,000 Futures: Stress-Testing an IUL

A policy illustration shows a single, smooth line. We replace it with ten thousand — using a volatility-clustering model and a moving index cap — to estimate the probability a policy actually does what it was sold to do.

June 11, 20267 min read
Industry

Why a 7.5% Illustration Isn't a 7.5% Reality

Indexed universal life is often sold on a single optimistic number. Cap compression and sequence-of-returns risk can make the illustrated design structurally unachievable — not from bad luck, but by construction.

June 9, 20266 min read
Technology

How OCR Turns a 400-Page Medical File into Structured Data in Minutes

A look inside our document digitization pipeline: classification, extraction, and the validation layers that keep error rates below human-review benchmarks.

May 28, 20265 min read
Risk Modeling

Monte Carlo Methods for Premium Financing Portfolios

Why deterministic projections fall short for leveraged life portfolios, and how stochastic cash-flow modeling captures the tail risks that matter.

May 19, 20266 min read
Industry

Lapse Behavior Is Changing. Your Assumptions Should Too.

Post-pandemic lapse data shows persistent shifts across age cohorts. We quantify the impact on portfolio valuations and recommend assumption updates.

May 7, 20265 min read
Underwriting

Precision Underwriting: Beyond the Debit-Credit Method

Multivariate mortality models outperform traditional debit-credit underwriting on our back-testing set. Here is the methodology and the results.

April 23, 20266 min read
Market Analysis

Q1 2026 Secondary Market Review: Volume, Spreads, and Signals

Transaction volume rose 14% year-over-year while gross spreads compressed. A data-first review of the quarter's most important movements.

April 9, 20265 min read
Technology

Why We Built Our Own Longevity Forecasting Stack

Off-the-shelf mortality tables average away the signal. Our engineering team explains the architecture behind cohort-level longevity forecasting.

March 26, 20265 min read