I am delighted to be able to speak to you tonight. In view of the pressures on my programme at the moment, you may feel that my delight is a bit shallow but I can assure you that it is not. It is a most refreshing and agreeable change to be talking to members of a profession that I do not cross swords with! In fact, I do have the very greatest respect for your profession and I am sure that what I have to say this evening, should be relevant. I intend to talk about Management Development and I am sure that you will agree that Actuaries are themselves managers: they are managers of money in one form or another and I become particularly interested when it is my money that they are managing. So any help that I may be able to give you most certainly is given with a personal and ulterior motive.

I want what I say tonight to be as practically based as possible, and for this reason I shall be talking mainly about Reed International. I want to tell you some of the ways in which managers should be—and are being—developed in Reed.

The purpose of this Note is to provide easily remembered rules for finding approximately the time required for money to multiply itself by any whole number up to 12, and by certain larger numbers, at a given rate of interest. The rules hold good for rates of interest up to about 100% per period. For ease of reference they are summarized at the end of the Note.

It may well be asked why anyone should want to memorize such rules when reference to tables of compound interest, or calculation by logarithms, would give the results very easily. One answer is that in a time of increasing wage and salary levels it is important for the actuary to be able to point out at once the practical effect of any proposed assumption as to future rates of increase. Such information is often needed at a meeting, where the overt or surreptitious consultation of a book of tables would not enhance his reputation.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the development and current status of variable annuities and variable life insurance in the United States of America. The author was fortunate in being granted a Fellowship by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust which enabled him to travel extensively in North America for two months in the summer of 1971. It is pointed out that this paper is the result of a large number of impressions formed by the author and has no claim to be a comprehensive treatise on the subjects. However, it is hoped that the paper will be of real interest to actuaries and others in the United Kingdom.

Part I of the paper deals with variable annuities, Part II with variable life insurance, and Part III with the special problem of providing minimum death benefit guarantees and maturity value guarantees for these variable products. Variable annuities are much more established in the United States than in this country, but variable life insurance is just in the process of being developed. Mention will be made of the broader issues as well as of actuarial matters.

Does Industrial Branch life assurance exist on the mainland of Europe? It is probably true to say that the average insurance man in the U.K. knows more about life assurance in North America, Australasia and South Africa than in France or Germany. This is particularly true when one considers Industrial Branch business. Certainly in my own case knowledge of European I.B. was limited to a vague idea that it did exist in a minor way in one or two countries such as France, Belgium and, possibly, Italy.

In fact, Industrial Branch life assurance exists in most Western European countries and the following is an attempt to summarize some of the features encountered during a tour which included visits to nine I.B. offices in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany, Austria and Italy. It does not pretend to be a technical actuarial treatise nor can it claim to be wholly representative of I.B. in these countries; rather it is a series of impressions.