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The purpose of this paper is to document some recent developments in unit linked life assurance and in particular Universal Life policies, highlighting some areas of current controversy and some potential problems.
Some of the reasons for the current design of Universal Life products are given in §2. Section 3 contains a detailed description of the operation of the policy and §4 describes briefly the benefits and options available. The methods used to make charges for expenses, commissions, benefits and profit are described in § 5 and some of the problems involved in deciding the levels of charges for benefits are discussed in § 6. Section 7 discusses the profit objective of the office and §8 highlights some aspects of valuation which are peculiar to Universal Life. Future developments and some speculation about the effect these will have on the Universal Life product are discussed in § 9 and a brief summary containing the major conclusions of the paper is given in § 10.
I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all those who gave advice and comments on the paper and to Andrea Hills for typing it.