The increasing competition from other forms of savings media which emphasise a favourable return on termination makes it desirable to reconsider the existing attitudes of the Life Offices to withdrawals. The aim of the paper is to discuss the current level of withdrawal rates and associated benefits for ordinary life assurance contracts.

In Section I a method of determining crude withdrawal rates is demonstrated and in Section II some of the factors which influence these rates are discussed.

The effect on immunization theory of the introduction of the concept of “contractual” withdrawal benefits is considered in Section III and in Section IV the current levels of withdrawal benefits and the margin for contingencies and profits are examined.

Little has been written about the ways in which computers can be used to deal with specifically actuarial problems, as opposed to data processing ones. The development of “higher-level” computer languages has enabled algorithms to be written in the form of programs which are reasonably intelligible, and with the use of one such language, Algol, the paper sets out to show how a variety of actuarial problems can be tackled.

Section 2 describes Algol in sufficient detail for the programs shown in the paper to be understood. Numerical Analysis is discussed in Section 3, which gives algorithms for some problems in Finite Differences, and Section 4 suggests the kind of program subroutines that may be required for statistical work. Part of the present Faculty Part II syllabus is dealt with in Sections 5 and 6 while Section 7 discusses the use that could be made of modern mathematical techniques, with the aid of the computer, in the problem of curve-fitting. Section 8 deals with the question of up-to-date actuarial notation and in Section 9 reference is made to two special column-processing computer languages, specially written for actuarial work, which are in use at the present time.