Description: In recent years, insurers have focused attention on the implementation of economic capital frameworks as part of risk management. Due to the diversity of products in an organization’s portfolio, its overall risk profile is comprised of different risk categories. The general framework used by an organization for economic capital purposes is to determine its exposure to each risk independently, then aggregate them to produce an overall risk profile. This is a study of aggregation techniques in use.

Description: Calculating the risk adjustment confidence level disclosure required by IFRS 17 if the risk adjustment itself is calculated using a cost of capital approach

Description: The authors introduce an alternative to Tail Contribution Analysis TCA for analyzing business segments and strategies called Economic Profit Analysis EPA. They discuss EPA’s key feature, “volatility replication,” an intuitively appealing process of building investor expectations and capital market information into the risk-and-return measurements used to evaluate strategic decisions. Finally, they illustrate the benefit of using EPA in overcoming the problems of TCA and thereby providing concise reliable information for business decision making.

Description: This paper illustrates a current approach to capital allocation, referred to herein as Tail Contribution Analysis TCA, using it to evaluate the impact of changes in an insurer’s operations by allocating capital to individual lines of business. It then highlights a common problem in the implementation of the procedure arising from reserve volatility and briefly notes the failure of the methodology to account for a firm’s changing levels of risk under various strategies. Finally, it introduces an alternative method for analyzing business segments and strategies called Economic Profit Analysis EPA. We will discuss EPA’s key feature, “volatility replication,” an intuitively appealing process of building investor expectations and capital market information into the risk-and-return measurements used to evaluate strategic decisions. Finally, we will illustrate the benefit of using EPA in overcoming the problems of TCA and thereby providing concise reliable information for business decision making.

Description: This Specialty Guide is designed to be a source of information for practitioners interested in: learning more about the subject of Economic Capital - definition, uses, tie-in to RBC and calculations - finding out about current market practices in this area, and getting acquainted with available literature on this topic.

Description: The article explores the use of economic capital modeling to deliver value to clients by improving the financial security of many individual lives around the world in a cost-effective way.

Description: Feature article discussing how insurers have reflected volatility in asset return assumptions when determining capital requirements, but have largely disregarded the impact of mortality volatility on their liability assumptions when performing stochastic analysis.

Description: This article discusses the global capital standards for Global Systemically Important Insurers (G-SIIs) and Internationally Active Insurance Groups (IAIGs) currently being developed by the International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS).

Description: Regularization, by means of trading restrictions, is an effective way to obtain sparse replicating portfolios. By including only the most relevant replicating instruments, the resulting portfolio is more efficient computationally, easier to interpret, and better able to approximate the liability on an out-of-sample basis. The instruments selected depend largely on their respective trading costs. This paper evaluates a number of alternative methods for specifying trading costs. We find that trading costs based on simple statistics of the instrument and liability cash flows are an effective choice in practice. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.