Ghosts of bullets dodged

I have never owned Steinhoff shares. I was surprised then, when going through some old blog uploads (dealing with a separate copyright issue that I may touch on in another post) to find this share price graph of Steinhoff from 2007 I don’t remember looking at this, but the blog entry was actually about insider …

Just what are ancillary own funds?

Reading the Financial Soundness Standards for Insurers (FSIs) is an exercise that can only end in madness. I’m sufficiently familiar with them now that I mostly refer back to them for particularly tricky or thorny issues. Without fail, the words fail to clearly communicate exactly what was intended. Take ancillary capital as an example. To …

Claims analysis, inflation and discounting (part 1)

I’ve had the privilege to straddle life insurance and non-life insurance (P&C, general, short term insurance, take your pick of terms) in my career.  On balance, I think having significant exposure to both has increased my knowledge in each rather than lessened the depth of my knowledge in either.  I’ve been able to transport concepts …

The Perfect Storm Part 1 – IFRS reporting under SAM

A client recently mentioned that they were concerned about the implication that the adoption of Solvency Assessment and Management (SAM) would have on insurance accounting under current IFRS4. The apparent concern was that measurement of policyholder liabilities for IFRS reporting would change to follow SAM automatically. Let me start out by saying this is categorically …

The Perfect Storm – Part 0

The world of financial reporting for insurers has never been this close to the edge. There is more change brewing now even than when Europe adopted “European Embedded Values” and later “Market Consistent Embedded Values”. The irony is that Embedded Values may well fall away as a result of the latest change. So what is …

IASB re-exposing IFRS 4 Phase 2

So, as I expected given the fundamental changes to IFRS 4 in recent months, the IASB is doing the grown-up thing and is re-exposing the latest version of the insurance accounting standard later this year early next year. They are restricting questions to areas that have changed or where final decisions haven’t been made, which …