Uses by Other Investors
SSs also have major attractions to other financial institutions—such as capital market
institutions, banks, and long-term investors—as means of acquiring risk exposures
that would otherwise be much more difficult for them to achieve. Such institutions
are always seeking to improve their risk-expected return trade-offs. Thinking in Capital
Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) terms, they are looking for new investment assets
with low (and preferably negative) betas measured relative to their existing portfolios.
From this perspective, mortality-based assets are particularly attractive because mortality
risks have low correlations with financial market risks—one imagines that these
correlations must be fairly close to zero—and hence low betas relative to their existing
portfolios. Hitherto, the problem for interested investors has been how to acquire such
assets: mortality-dependent investment outlets are few and far between. Yet SSs fill
this gap nicely. By allowing such investors to acquire mortality risk exposure, they enable
them to acquire surrogate mortality assets: a bond-based investor might engage
in one or more VSS, paying a preset amount and receiving a mortality-dependent
floating payment, and thus convert a “straight” bond into a survivor bond; or an
equity-based investor might swap some of the floating return on an equity portfolio
for a floating mortality-dependent return. Since the mortality risks have a low or zero
correlation with their other financial risks, such swaps would enable these firms to
reduce their overall risk exposure for no little or no loss of expected return.16 Indeed,
once such institutions start to see SSs as low-cost means of acquiring surrogate low
beta investment assets, the market for SSs could expand to a considerable size.