Description: This article provides an overview on one of the most budget-, resource- and time-consuming components in an insurers’ IFRS 17 implementation journey in Asia – the Subledger implementation. This article covers the key functionalities of a subledger system, as well as the important lessons learned during the implementation processes.

Description: The IAA has published a textbook-sized monograph on implementing risk adjustments under IFRS 17. This monograph will be helpful to those calculating the risk adjustment and those who want to know what the risk adjustment represents and how if affects period to period reporting.

Description: Risk adjustment is needed under IFRS 17 to reflect the compensation that a company requires for bearing the uncertainty about the amount and timing of the cash flows that arises from non-financial risk. Companies are also required to disclose the method and confidence level used for the calculation of the RA. However, IFRS 17 doesn’t specify a method and a confidence level, nor does it provide a list of specific risks that are considered to be non-financial risk. Companies need to define them based on their own preferences or existing practices. This article will introduce available approaches and discuss the confidence level approach with potential consideration stemming from industry preferences and illustrative examples.

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: The article discusses the critical role of Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) within insurance companies, particularly amidst changes in accounting regimes like USGAAP Long-Duration Targeted Improvements (LDTI) and International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) 17 and implications of these changes on FP&A activities.

Description: Market consistent valuations require path-dependent discounting for scenarios. IFRS 17's requirement to discount best-estimate cashflows using locked-in rates could give non-sensical results in many instances. This article describes a technique for calibrating each of the scenario's cashflows so that they can be discounted with other discount factors or curves without distorting the value of underlying options and guarantees.

Description: Recent and pending changes in financial reporting standards and regulations such as IFRS 17 and US GAAP Targeted Improvements are ramping up the performance pressures on actuarial models. New infrastructure technology in the cloud is driving modeling options that may well help actuaries successfully and economically meet these challenges and unlock even greater transformational change.

Description: We compare two predictive analytics methods - GLM and GBM in terms of predictiveness vs. interpretability.

Description: This article is about small business changes and challenges before and after COVID.

Description: Actuaries and their IT counterparts are required to collaborate more frequently and on more complex projects than ever before. The recent accounting changes (LDTI, IFRS 17, PBR), investor demands for increased transparency, and competitive pressures have led to many insurers undertaking large actuarial and financial transformations. As a result, senior management is challenging their actuarial and IT leaders to develop new processes that use data in new and improved ways. The actuarial and IT functions are being tasked with not only delivering on changes to systems, processes, and data, but also with rethinking how their teams collaborate and interact