Archive

  • Five years of InsuranceERM, five years on the tortuous journey towards Solvency II

    29 November 2013

    InsuranceERM was launched five years ago, in November 2008, when implementation of Solvency II was less than four years away. Now, it's still over two years away and a lot of water has passed under the bridge. Delving into the InsuranceERM archives, Peter Field charts the ebbs and flows on the way to the European Parliament vote last week for a January 2016 go-live date for Solvency II

  • Towers Watson's Tricia Guinn: "The insurance industry is becoming increasingly analytical"

    27 November 2013

    Towers Watson's decision to sell its reinsurance brokerage is part of a strategy to capitalise on the increasingly analytical and technical nature of the insurance industry, risk and financial services managing director Tricia Guinn tells Lorna Davies.

  • Benchmarking the internal capital model

    07 November 2013

    Aon 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

  • Caution: capital models at work

    06 November 2013

    The 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

  • Technology Guide 2013-14: vendors react to Solvency II delays

    29 October 2013

    Both 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?

  • Efficient asset allocation with least squares Monte Carlo

    23 October 2013

    Traditional 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

  • Communication is the next step in internal model validation

    09 October 2013

    Internal model validation has evolved rapidly in the last three years but the key to getting real value from the process in 2014 is to focus on communication, say Charl Cronje and Tom Durkin

  • Early warning indicators need further refinement

    04 October 2013

    The UK's Prudential Regulation Authority is currently trialling the use of early warning indicators (EWIs) to monitor the outputs from insurers' internal models. With plans to extend their application across Europe, Russell Ward, Eoin O'Byrne and Lyndsay Wrobel examine how EWIs might perform in practice – and find there is room for improvement

  • Lloyd's Savage highlights benefits of Solvency II readiness

    02 October 2013

    Luke Savage, director of finance and operations at Lloyd's, tells InsuranceERM about the market's reaction to low investment yields, its capital management plans, how it could yet be designated "systemically risky" - and why it's disbanded its Solvency II team.

  • Hopes build for better treatment of infrastructure investment under Solvency II

    27 September 2013

    Infrastructure investments provide a great match for insurers' liabilities, but Solvency II's crude view of the investment risk means money is not flowing as fast as it could. Milliman and JP Morgan Asset Management set out the justification for a review