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Friends Life's Mark Versey: "Infrastructure is now a core investment strategy"
22 November 2013Friends Life is now directly investing in both infrastructure and commercial real estate debt after awarding combined mandates of £1bn this year. Jamie Bullen asks chief investment officer Mark Versey what lies behind this new strategy
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Adopting the new insurance IFRS
20 November 2013There is enough clarity about the final form of the new accounting standard for insurance contracts for firms to begin their transition. Francesco Nagari outlines the tasks required - and warns of the heavy workload ahead
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Section 166s become more frequent, more diverse
13 November 2013UK regulators are making more use of their Section 166 powers to order third-party investigations into insurers and brokers – and broadening their focus. But they are still guaranteed to cause grief for firms, as Jamie Bullen reports
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Benchmarking the internal capital model
07 November 2013Aon Benfield polled almost 100 users of its ReMetrica capital modelling software to compare how often they ran their internal models, their speed of processing, the number of people involved – and a host of other interesting questions. Jason Noronha and Wing Lam present the results
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Caution: capital models at work
06 November 2013The prospect of Solvency II led many insurers to spend millions building internal capital models and the time has come to make them work for the business. But basing strategy on a tool that has been developed primarily with compliance in mind is not without risk, as Rob Collinson explains
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Will RMS(one) be the one?
01 November 2013The one system to manage all cat exposures and risks, that is. Early testers are enthusiastic, but RMS's claims for its new platform will take some time to assess, and the cost of using it could be a hindrance. Christopher Cundy reports
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Technology Guide 2013-14: vendors react to Solvency II delays
29 October 2013Both users and vendors of risk management systems have faced difficult decisions as a result of the further delay in Solvency II implementation. We look at the opportunities and problems created by this and issues such as: do faster systems have to be more complex, as well as more expensive, and will vendors offer more transparency into their models?
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Efficient asset allocation with least squares Monte Carlo
23 October 2013Traditional methods of allocating assets fall short in several key aspects. In this paper, Romain Lombardo and Alexis Bailly show how the LSMC approach can be used to optimise asset allocation for insurers in a Solvency II world
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The technologies reshaping insurance
18 October 2013The insurance industry doesn't often evoke science fiction. But recent technological advances have been so drastic they could have leapt from the pages of Isaac Asimov. Sarfraz Thind reports
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Understand, don't blend, cat models
11 October 2013The changes afoot in insurance markets make an "own view of risk" essential to the future of today's firms – and the best approach is not through blending of catastrophe models, argues Mike Duffy