The corporate landscape of United Kingdom financial services has changed considerably in the last fifteen years with virtually all the main players now shareholder-owned. The dominance of shareholder ownership may not last for ever and the pendulum could swing back to alternate structures. Should the actuarial profession look ahead and consider what, if anything, could be done to encourage diversity? This paper considers some of the issues involved and raises some questions for the profession to discuss.

In the light of recent judgments by the courts, there are areas where the interpretation of Policyholders' Reasonable Expectations (PRE) by actuaries may need to be reassessed. Furthermore, the discussion paper on the exercise of discretion expected from the Financial Services Authority (FSA), as part of its review of with-profits business, is likely to raise wider issues.

The time is therefore right for actuaries to have the opportunity to debate how PRE should be interpreted in the future. This paper is presented as a catalyst to enable that debate to happen, and the authors have set out their own views on some of the key issues.

The paper discusses certain areas where the interpretation of PRE adopted by Appointed Actuaries in the past may no longer be consistent with recent court judgments. Following that discussion, the actuarial profession should attempt to establish a revised interpretation of PRE, in order to provide greater assistance to Appointed Actuaries currently advising on with-profits business.

Our research deals with the way that calendar time affects mortality patterns in the Spanish population, and how this information can be used to elaborate predictions. A description of the observed mortality evolution has been worked out using data from 1975 to 1993. We have used Heligman-Pollard Law number two to model the evolution of Spanish mortality over the period and using univariate time series analysis, we have obtained a prognosis for years 1994 to 2010.

This paper reviews methods for hedging and valuation of insurance claims with an inherent financial risk, with special emphasis on quadratic hedging approaches and indifference pricing principles and their applications in insurance. It thus addresses aspects of the interplay between finance and insurance, an area which has gained considerable attention during the past years, in practice as well as in theory. Products combining insurance risk and financial risk have gained considerable market shares. Special attention is paid to unit-linked life insurance contracts, and it is demonstrated how these contracts can be valued and hedged by using traditional methods as well as more recent methods from incomplete financial markets such as risk-minimisation, mean-variance hedging, super-replication and indifference pricing with mean-variance utility functions.