Of course, the regulations in some form or other are coming and are likely to stay. The Actuary magazine has an article on some of the lessons for insurers and regulators about how to actually get some control and understanding of macro and systematic risks within the new regulatory models.

It is a good time, but I don’t currently have the time. I’m going to try to prepare a basic spreadsheet example to make it clearer. I’ve also decided on a provisional treatment of pure financial instruments that I hope will give useful results.

Watch this space.

As an aside, the use of IFRS balance sheet figures for regulatory reporting is also an unusual idea. There is no particular reason to believe that a shareholder financial reporting basis is appropriate as a regulatory measure. It can be, with specific capital rules perhaps, but it’s not automatically so.

Why the 10% of OCR rule for IBNR liabilities is so bad:

1. For very long-tailed business with no or low claims reported in the first year, the IBNR will be massively understated
2. as claims are reported (and before they are paid), the OCR will increase. The IBNR should decrease as the claims have now been reported, but given the 10% rule it will actually increase.
3. The reconciliation of opening to closing IBNR and the comparison of actual vs expected IBNR claims over time is not useful since there are no explicit expectations built into the methodology
4. Clearly the method is not sensitive to risks and delays of product lines or processes.

So what’s better? Well aside from the range of standard but fairly complex techniques (including Ultimate Loss methods, Basic Chain Ladder, Bornhuetter-Fergusson, Average Cost Per Claim and a whole range of stochastic methods) there are better simpler measures.

A starting point, although also very far from ideal, is the current (soon to be changed) South African statutory requirement of 7% of net written premiums. It also isn’t sensitive to different delay patterns and will give poor results if net written premium is growing or shrinking rapidly.

Really, the ideal simplification requires a little more complexity, but as a reward for this effort is a far more robust, more accurate measure that behaves sensibly in a far wider set of scenarios.

For each line of business for each delay year, we use a specified percentage of gross earned premium for the gross IBNR. Reinsurers’ share can be calculated similarly. The information relating to earned premium per line of business going back several years should be trivial to obtain and ensures we get a sensible pattern taking into account the growth in the business, the mix of business as well as change in mix of business. The method works well for start-up, mature or declining books.

The fundamental drawback of not reflecting a particular insurer’s patterns remains, but aside from using actual delay data this is about as good as one can hope for.

Frankly, why more regulators don’t prescribe this method is a mystery. The information is available, it’s trivial to calculate and verify and the results are robust.

The Nigerian financial services market is already significant and growing, but insurance is still quite small. Risk and capital management are embryonic and there are simply too few actuaries in the market to push practices beyond the 1970s.

Net Premium Valuations with only very crude allowances for expenses and not separate reinsurance balances are the norm. With Profits business management is a little Wild West with few protections in place for policyholders.

Let’s see how the trip goes.

It’s a good piece of legislation, even if at times some aspects of it may result in greater costs than benefits.

TimesLive has a story about the alleged noncompliance of medical schemes with the CPA.

Some of the issues may have merit, but this struck me as particularly troubling:

According to the act, it is unfair when a consumer is discriminated against on the grounds of age.

Our constitution explicitly allows discrimination on actuarially sound rating factors that have both a statistical and causal link. This is how insurance is South Africa still uses underwriting to select homogenous groups of risks and to limit anti-selection by policyholders. If widespread anti-selection were to occur, then life insurance would not be viable.

Medical Schemes in South Africa have only very limited underwriting options in order to provide as many citizens as possible with fair health coverage. “Late joiners” are charged a premium since they haven’t contributed to the societal risk pool since they were most healthy and therefore haven’t paid “their fair share”. This has to do with a specifically identified risk rather than general discrimination based on age. These restrictions are important to maintain the solvency and viability of medical schemes.

Some schemes prevent women who fall pregnant within nine months of joining the scheme from claiming for the pregnancy even though they pay full premiums

This point is more tricky, but it does again reflect a misunderstanding. “Full premiums” on an actuarial sound basis have probably not been paid, since the fair premium for a member who joins just to get pregnancy benefits and hasn’t contributed at other times would be much higher than the premium that is charged. This one is a little more grey and while I feel the rules are entirely fair, they may not be viewed that way by a particular judge on a particular day.

Some schemes require that members give three months’ notice when terminating their membership, whereas the act deems 20 business days to be reasonable

This might reflect the desire to not have members leave a scheme immediately after having utilized the maximum benefit available to them before joining another scheme. I don’t know how much of this behavior would ever happen, so this might also ultimately be changed.

Many schemes don’t enforce the allowed waiting periods for members joining. If some of these other changes were to be made, I would expect these provisions would be more regularly used. Of course, that is another of the problems cited with medical schemes arising from the CPA.

All in all, we may see some changes, but by and large these comments reflect a lack of appreciation for the actuarial realities of managing a health scheme with community rating.

New Business Margin, which is the Value of New Business (VNB) as a percentage of the Present Value of New Business Premiums (PVNBP) is a common measure of profitability of that news business.

But it’s a flawed measure, especially when it comes to comparing product lines and insurers or even to understand the change in profitability from one period to the next. It uses and unequal yardstick to measure business.

New Business Margin on Revenue (NBMR) provides a significantly improved measure of profitability that can be used to compare margins across products, across insurers and across time. Further, it leads easily to a component analysis of the margin, adding additional insights to shareholders, brokers and regulators.

If you haven’t read my introductory post on New Business Margin on Revenue, it would be worthwhile doing so now – this post is going to illustrate the sort of results it provides in a practical, numerical example.

Example 1 considers how NBMR clarifies distortions from a change in mix of business.

Example 2 shows how more complex dynamics can be understood through a component analysis of NBMR. The spreadsheet showing the underlying calcs is attached at the end of this post.

Example 1 – A change in mix of business

AGGREGATE PICTURE

Let’s look at the sort of aggregate information you’ll typically see in an EV report.

What one might take from this analysis is that VNB is constant, but margins are declining to below 2.0%. If this is the only information on which to base our analysis, this company might be a clear “sell” and products and pricing need to be updated by management.

Let’s see how this would look using NBMR

From this table we see again that VNB has been constant, but that the profitability of the business has actually been slightly increasing.  So, although we should consider attending to the zero-growth VNB, the actual margin we’re achieving on our business on this measure has improved slightly from 25.5% to 26.1%.

This is a more accurate picture, because as you can see from the following tables, all that has changed is our mix of business – and the investment business that we’re writing more of now actually has a higher NBMR than the risk business we’re selling less of.  The traditional New Business Margin measure is distorted because it treats the entire premium paid by the policyholder as “revenue” when in fact only a small share of it is fees and charges and the rest is more like a deposit.  Again, banks measure profitability and performance through RoE, Cost to Income Ratios and Net Interest Rate Margin and only very much behind those the return on total assets.

Analysis of NBMR and components via product line

So the New Business Margin is constant on a product view, but when compared it appears as if there is a declining trend.  Also, at 26.7% of revenue taken as profit for investment business, this is profitable business, a fact not obvious from the superficially low New Business Margin of 1.3% (which is actually a perfectly good profit margin on that measure, just difficult to understand and compare).

The Revenue Per Premium (RPP) is 100% for risk business and 5% for investment business.  Depending on policy size, a 5% deduction from every premium might be a little on the high side and from a Treating Customers Fairly and sustainability perspective, this area may require some attention.  It’s also fair to ask “why are we losing market share in risk products and what can be done about it”, but at least we see this as a mix of business and market share issue and not a business margin issue.

Example 2 – Complex changes in volume, profitability and other components

Aggregate picture

Example 2 is more complex.  Let’s look at the aggregate information on a traditional presentation first.

In this case it looks like we have a severe margin squeeze problem in spite of increased business volumes and increased VNB. By now it should be clear that it’s dangerous drawing conclusions from this information.

A more coherent aggregate view can be obtained using NBMR:

Here we see a strong 2011 increase in all of VNB, Business Volumes and New Business Margin on Revenue after a poor year in 2010.  On the whole, we are hanging to customers longer than before (Discounted Premium Term or DPT up form 5.4 in 2010 to 5.6 in 2011, but still not at the levels of 2009. This is worth investigating.

The share of each premium we get as revenue has dropped sharply – clearly suggesting a change in mix of business as this sort of change wouldn’t typically be seen otherwise. Clearly we need to dig further, but the previously bleak picture is already looking better – and as we’ll see this is a more accurate reflection of business reality.

ANALYSIS OF NBMR AND COMPONENTS VIA PRODUCT LINE

Immediately we see a huge amount of new information.  Risk business has been declining in profitability significantly and has also had a dramatic increase in lapse rates (since the Discounted Premium Term has dropped to 3.2, suggesting major problems with persistency).

At the same time, although 2010 was a step backwards in terms of DPT for Investment business, the increase in volumes of business (API), allied with a restoration of the DPT to close to 2009 levels, a reduction in RPP (suggesting better value for policyholders, which should give rise to better future sales, lower persistency and less regulatory intervention) and a strong growth in NBMR, driven off efficiencies, expense reductions and economies of scale through greater sales.

Our risk business is in trouble and requires attention, but we are building a solid, profitable and sustainable investment business that should provide good returns to shareholders.

Conclusion

These are stylised examples filled with hidden good news. The reality is that many insurers are struggling in several business units.  The analysis and tools outlined here can help make better informed decisions around product strategy and pricing, and for analysts wanting to better understand the current and potential future financial performance of these stocks.

For short-term business (group risk, health insurance, health administration, general insurance etc.) it is something different since these lines don’t have long-term prudent provisions. In these cases it reflects the present value of future profits expected to be earned out of the existing business.

The inclusion of these short term types of business within EV is widespread. It seemingly increases consistency between different types of contracts since we are considering the long-term expected profitability in all cases. More on this apparent consistency in a moment.

What do we include in the EV and VIF?

EV is not a complete economic measure of the value of an insurer, since it ignores future profits arising from future new business. This is by design. An Appraisal Value incorporates the Value of Future New Business (VFNB) as well, although there is always subjectivity over how many years of future new business should be included. (More on this in a separate post.)

Existing Business vs Future Business

The idea of “existing business” and “future new business” is clear in the individual life context. It’s existing business if you have a contract, and future new business if not. Premium increases and slight benefit modifications can usually be accommodated within the existing contract and so should ideally be included in the Value of In Force (VIF) based on the expected probabilities of these changes.

As such, the expected future premium increases should also be factored into the Value of New Business (VNB) when the business is originally sold. (Don’t confuse VNB with VFNB.  VNB is the value of business written over some past historical period, typically the last month, 6 months or year. VFNB is the expected value to owners of the business from business that will be sold at some point in the future.)

What counts as In Force for short term contracts?

The position is less clear for Group Risk or Motor policies. These are typically annual contracts, but with high expectations of renewal. In this case the renewals are typically included in the VIF at some assumed level of premium inflation reflecting wage growth rather than new business. Premium inflation is an important consideration in countries with non-negligible inflation. New employees on an existing Group Risk policy are also usually not considered new business since no new sales activity was performed or purchasing decision was made.

The rules applied then are quite well understood. However, we are valuing two different things between short term and long term contracts, and also a little bit of something we shouldn’t.

The source of value for long-term and short-term contracts in the EV

For long term contracts, we are valuing expected future surpluses arising out of a long-term contractual right and prudent regulatory provisions.

For short term contracts we are valuing the existing contract (a small portion of the total value) and the customer relationship that will give rise to future renewals.

There is also a component of customer relationship in the long-term contractual rights since poicyholders can lapse the contract, incur some penalties possibly, but ultimately not be required by law to continue paying premiums. It’s difficult to separate these components though.

Unintended inclusion of brand value

Now the interesting part: I maintain that by using a best estimate future renewal rate for short term contracts, we are actually valuing a portion of the brand over and above the customer relationship. This is best demonstrated by an example.

Example of confounding of customer relationships and brand value

Take a company with a 20pc market share in the group risk market in which it operates. Let’s also say that best estimate future renewal rate is 80pc. If we assume a constant market share percentage (arising because of the value of the brand, but may be also broker networks etc.) then 1 in 5 employer groups looking for group risk cover will choose our hypothetical company – ignoring customer relationships.

Some of our customers will be very pleased with our service and will renew for that reason. The good customer relationship is a significant source of value. However, some of our customer won’t particularly value our service or relationship. Some of these will leave, but others will stay anyway – because of the value of our brand.

In fact, we should expect 20pc of our existing customers to renew even if there is no customer relationship at all. Why should existing customers be less likely to choose us again even if there is no customer relationship than a brand new customer?

Some of our customers may be so put out by an unfortunate incident, poor service or a repudiated claim that they may deliberately not renew. A customer relationship doesn’t have to have positive value.

So of our 80pc renewals, 20pc renew for reasons independent of our customer relationship. So the correct renewal rate to apply when measuring customer relationships is actually 60pc.

The impact can be significant

This makes a significant difference to the VIF. For a 20 year projection and 20pc market share, the difference is a reduction in VIF of 46pc. For a 10 year projection with a 5pc market share, the difference is still 14pc.

You can test the impact using this Renewal Test model under Example Models.

What does this mean practically?

Now we haven’t changed the true value of the business; we’ve changed how much of it we recognise as a customer relationship. With a lower VIF, we would expect to see positive renewal experience variances (if we compare actual renewal rates to modelled) or higher volumes of new business (if we treat the portion of renewals related to overall market share as new business) athough the new business margin on revenue will be lower since we are modelling a lower Discounted Premium Term (DPT).

Neither of these results is very satisfactory. Perhaps the answer lies in separating renewal into a change in market share impact and the remaining renewal variance so that the VNB is still objectively measured as new sales, but the persistency profits are separately allocated between the known adjustment for brand and the actual deviations from renewals being further different than expected.

Merger and Acquisition pricing and accounting

Specifically though, this has important implications for accounting for insurance mergers and acquisitions and the types of intangibles created. It also feeds into the purchase price decision and valuation adopted for an acquisition. Ultimately, views of the Appraisal Value of annually renewable business must incorporate these important differences when compared to individual life businesses.

Bahrain has a population of around 1.2 million but has a well developed insurance sector. Economies of scale limit domestic growth and regional expansion faces tough competition and increased complexity. Will be interesting to see more.