19 May 2017

Flood of SFCRs begins as insurers rush to meet Solvency II deadline

The deluge of public solvency and financial condition reports (SFCRs) has begun with some of Europe's largest underwriters filing documents for group and solo entities, a day before the deadline for the latter.

Standard Life, Legal & General and Aviva have published a total of 17 SFCRs this morning.

This covers their various subsidiaries, and each conglomerate also published a group-wide filing, though these were not due until 1 July.

In total, these three insurers' various documents run to 1374 pages, and 35 megabytes worth of data. The longest was Aviva Group plc's, at 154 pages, followed by Standard Life (group) at 152 and Legal & General (group) at 127.

All these are appreciably longer than those from insurers filing over the past few weeks.

The 3,083 EU insurers that the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority lists as being subject to Solvency II are also publishing more, privately, to their regulators.

Unum, CNP Assurances and NN Group published their SFCRs last night.

Standard Life has published its quantitative reporting templates (QRT) separately to its narrative document, bucking the trend of having QRTs as codas on the SFCR.

Insurers concur that their in-house analysts and senior executives will pore over the data in rivals' SFCRs and QRTs to spot outliers by key metrics, and to identify if their own firm is anomalous.

While the industry has warmed somewhat less to the narratives contained in SFCRs, it acknowledges reading it for context behind the raw data will be important in the inaugural filings.

Supervisors will be receiving more information than is disclosed in the public SFCRs, in the form of a regular supervisory report (RSR) and a fuller set of QRTs.

All SFCR reports and associated quantitative reporting templates (QRT) will soon be available from InsuranceERM as part of a new insurance risk data service. This new service combines European insurers' financial and regulatory filings, including the new Solvency II disclosures, into a single, comprehensive and user-friendly database ideal for market/peer analysis, research and benchmarking. To find out more please email [email protected] or [email protected].