Description: The IFRS Foundation’s establishment of the International Sustainability Standards Board is a major step toward achieving relevant, decision-useful sustainability information for market participants that is comparable across industries and jurisdictions.

Description: Thoughts on the future of financial reporting.

Description: The IFRS Foundation’s establishment of the International Sustainability Standards Board is a major step toward achieving relevant, decision-useful sustainability information for market participants that is comparable across industries and jurisdictions.

Description: This article discusses facts and issues related to the selection of a stock’s price distribution.

Description: Health insurance company assets and liabilities have evolved since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law in March 2010. The ACA fundamentally rearranged how commercial health insurance is funded by integrating federal premium subsidies and pass-throughs together with a marketplace interwoven with transfer payments among stakeholders. The impacts of these programs can be seen in specific accounting items on the balance sheets of health insurance companies over the past 10 years. Their emergence follows three primary trends: (1) balance sheet items tend to be larger and take longer to settle, (2) there are more interactions among items, and (3) the final settlement amounts are more uncertain.

Description: This article helps companies better understand the currently proposed upcoming VM-22 regulation by comparing the VM-22 measurement model to LDTI MRBs. The article highlights key considerations as companies plan for adoption of these two measurement models. These considerations should help inform a company’s strategy related to the business impacted by these standards.

Description: This article provides a description of three factor updates for the NAIC Risk-Based Capital that will take effect in 2012.

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: This article gives details of the demutualization process of The Equitable Life Assurance Society, highlighting the decision process, actuarial issues and regulatory challenges.

Description: A summary of a preliminary report from the Committee on Valuation and Related Problems, on guidelines for quantifying balance sheet items in an insurance enterprise.