IFoA SP2 study guide
IFoA SP2 · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
SP2 - Life Insurance, formally titled Specialist Principles: Life Insurance, is an Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) Specialist Principles examination. It sits at the specialist stage of the IFoA qualification, after the Core Principles and Core Practice subjects, and is aimed at candidates who intend to work as life insurance actuaries or who need a recognised specialist credential in that practice area. The subject matter is life insurance actuarial practice: the products, the reserving and capital frameworks, the modelling, and the professional judgement that surrounds them. This page is an independent study resource and has no official affiliation with the IFoA. Candidates should be aware that the IFoA's own SP2 Life Insurance study page was archived as of retrieval on 5 November 2026 and now returns only a generic archived-page notice, so exam structure details such as question counts, duration, pass mark, fees and retake rules could not be confirmed from it and are not stated here. To prepare, work from the current IFoA curriculum and the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), which the IFoA describes as offering thousands of high-quality learning resources, short courses and microlearning materials, including event recordings, research papers and working party outputs. Topics on this exam: Life insurance actuarial practice (Specialist Principles). The IFoA SP2 study guide has 1 section and about 424 words.
01Life Insurance Actuarial Practice (SP2): Solvency II, IFRS 17 and With-Profits
SP2 covers how a UK life insurer is priced, reserved, capitalised, reported and governed. Questions combine calculation with judgement: state your basis, apply regulation as it stands, explain the commercial consequence. Products include term and whole life assurance, annuities, income protection, with-profits and unit-linked savings, and bulk annuity buy-ins. Solvency II technical provisions = best-estimate liability (discounted cash flows, expenses allowed, no prudence) + risk margin.
424 words, about 2 minMore study resources for IFoA SP2
- Practice questionsA life insurer prices a without-profit term assurance using a gross premium basis.
- FlashcardsNet premium reserve. The present value of future benefits less the present value of future net premiums, valued at the reserving basis at duration t; for whole life it is A {x+t} minus P times a-double-dot {x+t}.
- Cheat sheetNet premium reserve (prospective): V t = A {x+t} − P·ä {x+t} using the valuation basis; gross premium reserve replaces P with the gross premium and loads expenses explicitly.
- Key termsBest estimate assumption. The central, unbiased assumption about a future experience factor such as mortality, persistency or expenses, with no deliberate margin for prudence.
- Study planMap the SP2 syllabus into a one-page topic tree covering life insurance product design, pricing, reserving, capital, and regulation, then rank each topic by your current confidence.
- Common mistakesCandidates carry over the habit of demonstrating arithmetic competence and treat the mark allocation as if accuracy of the final figure were the objective; under time pressure the prose feels like padding and gets cut first.
- Exam-day guideSP2 is delivered as a written/online exam depending on the sitting arrangements in force.