Description: Businesses across the board have been drastically impacted by the effects of COVID-19 over the course of 2020, and insurance was not immune. Perhaps most relevant to this industry’s current capital and liquidity concern is the prevailing low interest rate environment. This has been a global trend in the last decade, and treasury rates in much of the developed world are at or near zero. Reduced investment returns limit an insurer’s ability to achieve their desired return on equity, eliminating previously profitable strategies that depended on the leverage of life and annuity balance sheets. Focus and activity have instead shifted to other methods to counteract the low interest rate markets and accompanying capital strain. Examples include increased mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity within the insurance industry and an increasing focus by private equity firms in the insurance market for asset-intensive products, both of which reflect the goal of increasing yield rates on capital.

Description: The implementation of the IFRS 17 insurance accounting standard has brought significant changes to the financial reporting landscape of insurance companies. With new disclosure requirements and altered profit analysis, understanding and interpreting future profitability have become a topic of concern for the industry. While stability remains a key objective for insurance companies, the earning patterns might become more volatile especially when the contractual service margin (CSM) is exhausted, and a loss component (LC) needs to be established. Reinsurance, a common risk mitigation tool, can play a pivotal role in managing earnings volatility and minimizing losses for onerous measurement units. In this article, we propose a new key performance indicator (KPI) called “loss recoverability” to assess the performance of reinsurance treaties in achieving these objectives. We explain how this KPI can be utilized in multiple scenarios to evaluate the effectiveness of reinsurance strategies and pursue stability in earning patterns.

Description: ongoing discussion of the proper interest rate to use in discounting liability cash flows to reflect credit risk of the insurer in a fair value accounting system

Description: The September 2014 Issue of the Financial Reporting Section's newsletter, The Financial Reporter

Description: This article investigates how financial reporting will change once Solvency II becomes business as usual.

Description: Discussion of how meaningful GAAP ROE is as a measurement of management performance or how well management has deployed capital over a reporting period.

Description: Feature article discussing the insurance industry in Australia.

Description: Discusses the recent developments with RBC requirements. At the forefront of the RBC changes is the stochastic exclusion test.

Description: Quarterly update on regulatory trends of interest to financial reporting actuaries.

Description: Discuss different approaches of XXX and AXXX relief solutions