Throughout the past couple of decades, the surge in the sale of equity-linked products has led to many discussions on the evaluation and risk management of surrender options embedded in these products. However, most studies treat such options as American/Bermudian style options. In this article, a different approach is presented where only a portion of the policyholders react optimally due to the belief that not all policyholders are rational. Through this method, a probability of surrender is obtained based on the option moneyness and the product is partially hedged using local risk-control strategies. This partial hedging approach is versatile since few assumptions are required for the financial framework. To compare the different surrender assumptions, the initial capital requirement for an equity-linked product is obtained under a regime-switching equity model. Numerical examples illustrate the dynamics and efficiency of this hedging approach.

Insurers have been concerned about surrenders for a long time especially in saving business, where huge sums are at stake. The emergence of the European directive Solvency II, which promotes the development of internal risk models (among which a complete unit is dedicated to surrender risk management), strengthens the necessity to deeply study and understand this risk. In this paper, we investigate the topics of segmenting and modelling surrenders in order to better take into account the main risk factors impacting policyholders' decisions. We find that several complex aspects must be specifically dealt with to predict surrenders, in particular the heterogeneity of behaviour as well as the context faced by the insured. Combining them, we develop a new methodology that seems to provide good results on given business lines, and that moreover can be adapted for other products with little effort.