The clock is ticking on International Financial Reporting Standard 17 (IFRS 17), the January 1, 2023, compliance deadline drawing ever closer. For insurers around the globe struggling with self-development or “empty box” software solutions, there is a new path forward: KPMG IFRS 17 Express – powered by SAS®. The IFRS 17 solution blends KPMG’s deep IFRS experience, SAS’ best-of-breed analytics and an IFRS 17 methodology globally tested by Allianz, one of the world’s leading insurance groups with customers in more than 70 countries.
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The 2021 Global Insurance Market Report (GIMAR) reports on the outcome of the 2021 Global Monitoring Exercise (GME), the IAIS’ risk assessment framework to monitor key risks and trends and to detect the potential build-up of systemic risk in the global insurance sector. The report also provides an update on the outcome of the Covid-19 targeted assessment based on year-end 2020 data. The GME builds on data collected from approximately 60 of the largest international insurance groups (individual insurer monitoring or IIM) and aggregate sector-wide data from supervisors across the globe (sector-wide monitoring or SWM), covering over 90% of global written premiums. Continue reading…

Insurance firms may not be ready to implement new product governance rules there to ensure insurance provides fair value, according to a review published by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Part of the FCA’s ongoing work to ensure consumers receive fair value, the review looked at how firms designed, sold and reviewed their products to ensure they met the needs of their customers. The findings show that some firms had made good progress in meeting the FCA’s existing rules and guidance on product governance and value, issued in 2018 and 2019, as well as against temporary guidance on product value, issued in response to Covid-19 last year.

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by Dan Mihai

City Insurance is at risk of becoming bankrupt because of its hundreds of millions of euros in debt. The company failed to prove to the Romanian Supervisory Financial Authority (ASF) that it holds the legal minimum amount of money (150 mil. €) in order for it to operate, thus risking its operating license to be taken away. A dutch investment fund of questionable origins bought the insurance company for the necessary amount, but didn’t keep its commitment of making the payment in time. Tens of thousands of opened claims from the City Insurance clients are going to be transferred to the Guarantee Fund for the Insured (FGA). Continue reading…

How many insurers were subject to winding-up proceedings since the introduction of Solvency II on 1/1/2016? In part I, we revealed that based on the OJ publications about 20-30 insurers have been subject to winding-up proceedings. But is 23 (or 34) the true story? Would the findings of the second source, the data of the national supervisory authorities, corroborate these revelations? Continue reading…

by Lieve Lowet

It must be the best kept secret in town (apart from EIOPA’s Supervisory Handbook) how many insurers and reinsurers went bankrupt since the introduction of the Solvency II framework directive (SII FD). Trying to piece together the answer on the basic question of  how many insurers went belly up since the introduction of Solvency II on 1/1/2016 proved to be a Sherlock Holmes story. But here is what I found. Continue reading…

The International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS) has completed the first year of monitoring for the Insurance Capital Standard (ICS). The ICS aims to provide a globally comparable risk-based measure of capital adequacy of International Active Insurance Groups (IAIGs) and a common language to facilitate effective supervisory discussions of group solvency. The ultimate goal is a single ICS that includes a common methodology by which one ICS achieves comparable, ie substantially the same, outcomes across jurisdictions. The IAIS Executive Committee (ExCo) recently reviewed results from the 2020 ICS data collection and agreed to progress the 2021 ICS data collection with a small number of revisions to address issues that were identified through the data analysis and from the feedback received in the first year of the monitoring period. In June, the IAIS will publish the updated ICS specifications for the second year of the monitoring period. Continue reading…