But for many, this promise is being hindered by a foundational legal concept: The Principle of Indemnity.

By insisting that property insurance must always be a contract of indemnity (meaning you cannot recover more than your actual, audited loss) regulators have forced the industry into a structural kludge known as the “Dual Trigger.” It’s a legal “fix” that satisfies the status quo but creates a cascade of inefficiencies for insurers and consumers alike.

The Mechanism of the “Dual Trigger”

In a rational parametric model, the data event is the payout. In the regulated world, however, two hurdles must be cleared:

1. The Data Trigger: The physical event occurs (e.g., wind speed, rainfall).
2. The Indemnity Proof: The policyholder must provide evidence that their actual loss equals or exceeds the payout.

This second trigger creates what we might call the Indemnity Trap. It caps the payout at the lower of the two values, fundamentally changing the nature of the risk.

Where the Principle of Indemnity comes from – and why it is a good idea in traditional insurance

Traditional insurance needs indemnity. It ensures the contract restores you rather than enriching you. In the non-life market, we insure the uncertainty of a loss. We don’t just insure the occurrence of an event.

If you could collect a payout that far exceeded your actual loss, you’ve moved from a safety net to a lottery ticket. This “Lotto Effect” turns insurance into a legally sanctioned wager. That windfall potential creates a toxic moral hazard. It invites fraud like arson or staged theft. It also rewards negligence. Why protect an asset when you are worth more if it burns?

By capping payouts at the Ultimate Net Loss, we align the policyholder’s interests with the asset’s survival. Insurance remains a stabilizing force. It protects wealth. It doesn’t generate profit from destruction.

The Problem: Asymmetric Basis Risk

This structure creates a profound misalignment. When we layer an indemnity cap onto a parametric trigger, we create a one-way street of risk:

• When the data misses: If the storm causes massive damage but the sensor doesn’t hit the trigger, the policyholder gets nothing. This is the “Negative Basis Risk” everyone acknowledges.
• When the data hits: If the sensor hits the trigger but the physical damage is light (perhaps because the owner invested in resilience), the indemnity rule steps in and caps the payout.

The result is a structure where the payout can be lower than the data suggests, but never higher. This isn’t a malicious choice by insurers; it is a structural constraint that leaves the risk transfer incomplete. It also reintroduces the very thing parametrics were meant to kill: payout delays. The moment you require a loss audit, the “instant cash” benefit of the parametric model is lost to the administrative friction of the indemnity process.

The Pricing and Underwriting Friction

This isn’t just a headache for policyholders; it complicates pricing.

To price a “clean” parametric policy, an actuary only needs weather data. But to price a policy with an indemnity cap, they must also predict the probability of the cap being hit. This requires traditional, granular underwriting of the asset. We’ve replaced a low-cost, scalable model with a high-cost, bespoke one, simply to satisfy a legal definition.

Assessing the Regulatory Responses

Why do regulators cling to the indemnity requirement? While the intentions are often centered on market stability, the logic behind these defenses deserves a closer look.

Argument 1: The Mitigation Incentive The traditional logic is that indemnity prevents moral hazard. The fear is that if people “profit” from a disaster, they will want the disaster to happen. However, this overlooks a critical reality of resilience. Traditional indemnity insurance actually discourages mitigation. If you spend your own capital to save your factory with sandbags, your indemnity payout simply drops to match your lower loss. In a parametric model without an indemnity cap, you are rewarded for that foresight. You keep the surplus as a “resilience dividend.” The current rules are, in effect, a structural barrier to climate adaptation.

Argument 2: Speculation vs. Insurable Interest There is a concern that without a proof of loss, insurance becomes a “Lotto” or a wager on the weather. But the gatekeeper against speculation should be Insurable Interest, not Indemnity. If a buyer demonstrates a legitimate economic exposure to the event at the point of sale, the speculative element is already addressed. We do not need a cumbersome audit at the back-end to solve a licensing and gatekeeping question at the front-end.

Argument 3: The Life Insurance Precedent It is often argued that property must be treated differently from life insurance because assets have a market value that must not be exceeded. Yet, the Life, Disability, and Critical Illness sectors function perfectly well as “valued contracts.” These are multi-trillion dollar industries that rely on Insurable Interest and a Reasonable Sum Assured. There is no fundamental logical reason why a crop, a solar farm, or a retail business could not be treated with the same “valued contract” logic we already apply to human life.

The Path Forward: The “Ought”

We shouldn’t be trying to “fix” parametric insurance by adding indemnity caps. We should be updating the regulatory framework to recognize Index-Based Insurance as a distinct legal category.

A modern, rational framework would require three things:

1. Provable Insurable Interest (Ensuring the buyer has skin in the game).
2. Reasonable Sum Assured (A cap based on total economic exposure, not just physical damage).
3. Objective, Independent Data Triggers that are demonstrably correlated with the risk exposure

The current “Dual Trigger” system isn’t a design choice; it’s a symptom of a regulatory system that hasn’t changed fast enough. I’d argue the regulations are focused too much on the potential cost and risk of change, while glossing over the downsides of not changing.

Is it time to stop forcing 21st-century risk tools into a 19th-century legal box?

This article outlines a collection of common and problematic pitfalls I’ve seen in ORSA stress and scenario testing, capital modelling, and governance. Some are technical, some cultural, and all are worth addressing if we want the ORSA to do what it should: support better decision-making under uncertainty.

These insights reflect my experience across a wide range (and varying quality) of ORSAs, including independent reviews, informal and formal regulatory feedback (including from the Prudential Authority), informal discussions with regulators, and public statements from supervisors across multiple jurisdictions.

1. Toothless Scenarios and Soft Stresses

• Many ORSA scenarios are too mild to test anything meaningful.
• Often there’s no indication of severity. Is this a 1-in-5 or 1-in-50 event? Without context, interpretation is impossible.
• Firms are sometimes surprised they survive a 1-in-200 scenario, forgetting that survival at that level is by design.

2. Recycled, Stale, or Misaligned Scenarios (and Ignored Emerging Risks)

• Same tired stresses reused each year without meaningful refresh.
• Narrative scenarios assigned numerical calibrations that don’t match the story.
• Horizon scanning is often absent or perfunctory; emerging risks must be systematically identified and tested.
• Scenario testing should anticipate what could plausibly happen next, not merely repeat past events.

3. Implausible or Alienating Scenario Design

• Unrealistic or inconsistent scenarios alienate management and the board.
• Severe scenarios are valuable, but they must be framed with historical precedent or research to be credible.
• Overconfidence in models is dangerous; even the best models can fail catastrophically, as history shows.

4. Over-Engineering vs Usefulness

• Attempting to build the “most accurate” pandemic scenario misunderstands the point: scenarios are for learning and planning, not for prediction.
• Prioritise strategic insight over technical perfection.

5. Investment Returns Detached from Reality

• While not common, flat investment income across stress scenarios is a serious modelling failure.
• Investment returns must reflect changes in asset levels and market conditions under stress.

6. LACDT: Tax Calcs Behaving Badly

• Deferred tax recoverability often lacks robust testing.
• Future stressed profits must first create a DTA before any LACDT benefit can be recognised. Tiering here can hit you – more than you considered for the base SCR calc and your QRT.
• Income vs capital gains treatment and tax fund nuances are often overlooked.
• Just because LACDT can’t be negative (per the FSIs), doesn’t mean you can’t have existing DTAs fail recoverability testing in a stress and have loss amplification from deferred taxes!

7. Tiering and Fungibility Constraints Not Considered

• Capital tiering restrictions often ignored under stress.
• Assumed fungibility between entities or tiers can be unrealistic, especially under stress scenarios.
• See the point about DTA and tiering above too.

8. Over-Reliance on Standard Formula Extrapolation

• Normal distribution assumptions are often inappropriate; t-distributions, Lognormal, Pareto tails, or piecewise fittings are better suited.
• Ideally your own experience should be able to inform 1 in 10 stresses and act as a sanity check on scaled 1-in-200 stresses.
• Thin historical experience leads to poor calibration of rare-event risks, especially for equity markets.
• And really, there are several standard formula stresses that are probably not appropriate as a starting point. Some non-life cat stresses may be too conservative – and mass lapse has its critics, but life cat risk, expense risk, and retrenchment risk stresses are likely too low.

9. Unrealistic Business Volume and Expense Assumptions

• Base cases often adopt stretch targets as certain outcomes.
• Expenses are incorrectly assumed to scale perfectly down with policy volumes, ignoring the reality of fixed costs.

10. Incurred vs Paid Confusion

• Claims incurred and claims paid are routinely confused. The impact on profit vs balance sheet and cash can be counter-intuitve.
• Timing differences, especially under IFRS 17 (LCI/CIP dynamics), matter for liquidity and solvency modelling.

11. Short Projections for Long Risks

• Three-year horizons are insufficient for long-burn risks including the obvious candidate – climate change.
• Five years should be the baseline internally, with qualitative insights over longer horizons. Yes, the reliability decreases as the term increases, but it can still be informative. You may chose to disclose only 3 years more broadly, but the longer view is important to at least understand trends.
• Long-term (10–30 year) qualitative assessments should supplement the ORSA, accounting for amplifying systemic interactions.

12. Disconnect Between ORSA and Management Forecasts

• Management runs the business based on one view; the ORSA is prepared using another.
• Without alignment, the ORSA cannot pass the use test or add value to strategic decision-making.

13. Ignoring Dynamic Risk Interactions

• Risks are often modelled in isolation.
• In reality, correlations and feedback loops matter: lapse impacts guarantees, claims experience shifts reinsurance pricing, and market volatility affects lapse and claims simultaneously.

14. Either No Management Actions, or Superhero Versions

• Some ORSAs model no management actions (overly conservative but unrealistic).
• Others assume immediate, flawless actions without delay or cost (equally unrealistic).

15. Unexplained Profit and NAV Changes

• ORSA profit projections must reconcile to balance sheet movements.
• Adjustments between IFRS and SAM/Solvency II frameworks should be clearly documented.

16. ORSA Process Too Slow to Be Relevant

• A nine-month ORSA development cycle leads to stale outputs.
• ORSA timing must be aligned with the business planning cycle and responsive to external shocks.

17. Weak QA and Model Review

• Detailed, independent model review is often absent.
• Common failures include claims timing mismatches, unrealistic ROEs, omitted asset growth dynamics, and unstated assumption interactions.

18. Boilerplate Overload, Insight Underload

• ORSAs are often bloated with standard wording, burying the important insights.
• Focus must remain on what is changing and what genuinely informs management decisions.

19. No Trigger or Process for Out-of-Cycle ORSA

• Firms sometimes only trigger an out-of-cycle (OOC) ORSAs for an SCR breach — far too late. If the risk or solvency situation (internal or external) has changed, it’s time for an OOC.
• Proportional, trigger-based OOC ORSAs must be defined and actioned when material changes occur.
• An OOC doesn’t need to cover the entire process or the full 80 page report. Just the key parts that have changed.

20. Reverse Stress Testing as an Afterthought

• Reverse stress testing needs to explore genuinely different failure modes, not just ramp up severity.
• Defining what constitutes “failure” (capital breach, strategic collapse, or profitability death spiral) needs careful thought.

21. Weak or Missing Rationale for Scenario Selection

• Documenting why scenarios are chosen reveals how the firm prioritises risk.
• Disconnects between identified risks and tested scenarios highlight critical weaknesses.

22. Board Engagement and Use Test Failures

• Board sign-off without meaningful engagement misses the point.
• Effective risk functions bring ORSA components to the Board repeatedly during the year to drive strategic debate.

In Closing

None of these issues is inevitable. Most stem from habits — some from lack of scrutiny, others from good intentions that weren’t tested hard enough. But if the ORSA is to support real-world resilience, it has to reflect how capital and risk actually behave. That means grounding assumptions, engaging the business, and constantly asking: “Would I act on this?†

If the answer is no, the ORSA needs work. If the answer is yes, you’re on the right track.

Even for a leanly capitalised (re)insurer (SCR cover 1.2x) this implies a CQS of 8, better than the largest, most conservatively capitalised insurers in South Africa.

No externally rated insurer or reinsurer in South Africa has a CQS of better than 11 or 12. The table in 10.9 ignores sovereign or country risk in the default risk assessment. Therefore, it significantly understates spread and default risk.

The question here is not whether there is an absolute sovereign cap that no South African entity can be rated above. The issue is that applying this table almost certainly understates the risk and CQS relative to rated entities because it ignores sovereign risk.

In terms of the sovereign cap, the risk of exposure to South Africa is (and should be) factored into the rating for entities with significant exposure (asset, operations, profit sources, regulatory risk, inflation, appropriation et al) in South Africa. This usually results in predominantly South African businesses not having a credit rating better than the sovereign.

There is more to reinsurance optimisation that interpreting the FSIs. The application of the sovereign cap is also mostly a distraction from the choices of reinsurer and reinsurance programme to manage risk and capital.

#capitalmanagement #reinsurance #CQS #optimisation #sovereigncap #creditrisk

At a minimum, the contribution to group surplus/deficit Own Funds (in excess of, or the deficit where Own Funds don’t cover the SCR), should be shocked for currency risk. This makes sense as soon as you think about what the risk to the group’s SCR cover is on currency depreciation. (Where there is a deficit, foreign currency appreciation is the risk, not depreciation. The opposite is true – and more intuitive – when there is a deficit.)

The final answer is that ICS will likely not be applied to everyone in South Africa, but it may inform the development of SAM group reporting. It may also be the basis of choice for subsidiaries in other jurisdictions. ICS is probably more relevant than you thought.

Here are the Micro insurance sessional 2018 slides for anyone interested, provided of course without warranty or guarantee at all and with the understanding that the views expressed are not me employer and are not even all mine as this was partly the output of committee debates.

Another way to deal with the problem of competition in credit life is to simply not permit the sale of insurance at the same time as the loan. This means that more providers will have an opportunity to make the sale since the lender doesn’t have the ability to slip the product in alongside the loan.

Some problems:

• Overall this will increase acquisition costs as it is extremely cost efficient to distribute along with the loan granting process.
• The lender is still in the best position to follow up with an outbound sales lead in the days or weeks after the loan has been granted (unless they are prohibited from selling at all, which is another option that can be considered)
• Lenders may not be prepared to lend without the protection of credit life in place
• The reality remains that for some lenders, for some loans and for some credit life policies, the product acts as a source of revenue rather than a risk mitigant. Without that extra revenue, the loan might not be viable due to risks and expenses of collecting the installments.

So this approach is not without its own troubles.

The question as to whether the benefit payable under a credit life policy can or should include arrears payments.

The purpose of a credit life policy is to protect the policyholder, the lender, and the policyholder’s estate (not necessarily in that order) against death, disability or retrenchment. This is only effectively achieved if the entire amount owing under the credit agreement is paid off by the policy.

So as a starting point, it would make sense for arrears to be included. All the stakeholders in the arrangement want this.

Back to the legal stuff

What do the credit life regulations say?

for death cover: the outstanding balance of the consumer’s total obligations under the credit agreement;

While the term “total obligations” is not defined in the credit life regulations, I challenge anyone to argue with a straight face that this would not include arrears payments.

The National Credit Act itself says:

A credit provider may require a consumer to maintain during the term of their credit agreement—

(a) credit life insurance not exceeding, at any time during the life of the credit agreement, the total of the consumer’s outstanding obligations to the credit provider in terms of their agreement;

Again, I don’t see how the arrears payments don’t count as an obligation.

Is there something else here?

Arrears from when, might be the question.  For a third party insurer, one can understand the trepidation in paying the full outstanding balance plus arrears all accumulated at the contractual interest rate.

A lender could be quite happy to delay finding out about deaths and delay further in reporting them, safe in the knowledge that they are earning high interest rates with the credit risk of the insurer, rather than the original borrower, standing behind them.

This feels like a separate issue though. Agreeing to make payment as at date of claim or end of waiting period is one thing. An outright restriction on including arrears in the benefit is not correct.

What about for credit life insurance within a group?

Where the benefit is paid by one part of a group (the insurer) to another part of the group (the lender) there should be even less cause for concern about timing of claims and payments. Games can be played with claim ratios and profit recognised within the insurer vs the lender, and value for money measures being affected. Again though, that’s a separate issue all on its own.

In this post I want to discuss substitute policies again, talk about cover for self-employed persons and definitions of waiting periods.

What is a substitute policy

Substitute policies are one of the few drivers of real potential competition and therefore competitive markets for credit life in South Africa. That’s probably not the definition you were expecting but nevertheless it is true.

With some exceptions, credit life is not sold in a competitive or symmetrical environment and customers have little or no bargaining power.

A substitute policy is a policy from another insurer (not connected to the lender) that covers the same or similar benefits and legally must be accepted as a substitute for the cover required by the lender under the terms of the loan.

Historically, the rate of substitute policies was tiny. Often less than 1%. Lenders and their associated insurers weren’t exactly incentivised to make it an easy process. For smaller loans and therefore smaller policies, the incremental acquisition costs can be prohibitive.

Substitute policies are gaining momentum

I am aware of several players specifically targeting existing credit life customers and aiming to switch these customers to their own products.

This has been enabled through:

• standardising of credit life policies
• bulking of many different small credit life policies into a larger one that is more cost effective to acquire and administer
• technology (digital / online especially but also call centres) that can moderate costs
• the growing awareness of how profitable these policies often are for a standalone insurer, even at the various caps imposed.

Lenders may need to supplement revenue on high risk customers because interest rate caps apply, but the stand alone insurer is focussed on a reasonable underwriting result, not the level necessary to offset costs elsewhere.

What counts as a substitute policy / minimum prescribed benefits

A substitute policy simply needs to cover the minimum benefits from section 3 of the credit life regulations. This covers death, permanent disability, temporary disability and unemployment or loss of income.

These regulations can be difficult to interpret, but ultimately are clear:

• You must pay the total outstanding balance on death or permanent disability
• You must pay the shorter or 12 months’ installments, all the remaining contractual installments, or until the policyholder returns to work in the case of temporary disability, retrenchment, or the inability to earn an income.
• you may not charge for unemployment or loss of income if the person is not employed, except that if they are self-employed then you can charge and must provide the benefit or “loss of ability to earn an income”.
• You may not charge for disability for someone who is a pensioner.
• The cost must be based on the risk, and you must be able to demonstrate that to the regulator.
• While you may not charge more than the cap, anybody who increases premiums to the cap will likely have to explain how the risks suddenly increased. (It is possible that the benefits required are richer than previously offered, so this isn’t an automatic problem.)

All of this makes complete sense to me, although the provision of loss of employment benefits to the self-employed does pose risks of anti-selection, moral hazard and outright fraud.  There is no prohibition on sensible anti-fraud measures.

Some have interpreted this to say a substitute policy must offer the same benefits as the original insurer. This is not correct. Only the minimums under section 3 need to be met. Any richer benefits, under section 5 or elsewhere, are irrelevant to the substitution of the policy.

Confusion possibility on cover for self-employed persons

I have heard that one financial services provider is insisting that cover for self-employed people either may not be offered or must not be offered. If so, this is likely due to an incomplete reading of the regulations.

3 (3) says:

Subject to sub -regulation (5), where a consumer is not employed on the date that the credit life insurance policy is entered into, no cost relating to the risk of becoming unemployed or being unable to earn an income may be included in the cost of the credit life insurance.

3(5) says:

Where a consumer is self – employed in the formal or informal sector, or employed in the informal sector on the date the credit life insurance policy is entered into, the credit life insurance policy may include the cost relating to the risk of the consumer being unable to earn an incarne other than as a result of retrenchment or occupational disability.

Last piece of the puzzle is 3(2) (c)

in the event of the consumer becoming unemployed or unable to earn an income

So, in other words, unemployment OR loss of income must be covered. And the prohibition of charging for that benefit where the person is unemployed (for obvious reasons) is relaxed if the person is self-employed (for similar obvious reasons and consistency).

Loss of income cover for self-employed persons must be provided.

Confusion possibility on waiting periods

Waiting periods are permitted on disability benefits for longer terms loans, although waiting period is not defined.  It is fairly standard in South Africa to use waiting period differently in different contexts, which doesn’t help

• a “waiting period” on non underwritten death cover (like funeral) that starts from policy inception before the policyholder is eligible for natural cause death benefits. Typically only accidental deaths are paid within the first 3 to 6 months.
• a “waiting period” on a disability policy which is the time from a claim even until the benefit is paid.  This is also called a deferred period.  For example, you might need to be disabled for 4 or 8 weeks before benefits would then be paid.  Different providers would back-pay to the start of claim or pay from the end of the deferred period. This is to decrease small claims and the associated expenses and to be sure that you really are disabled and not just “sick”.

My reading of this, including the fact that it only applies to disability benefits and that ASISA standard definitions use the second definition, is that the second definition rather than the first is the one to apply.

What does this all mean for substitute policies

Substitute policies must provide cover for the self-employed, can apply the right sort of waiting period (even if it is less generous than the original policy), and may not provide the wrong sort of waiting period.

There are clear incentives for providers of substitute policies to focus on low cost, minimum benefits to attract customers. The insurer associated with the lender similarly has incentive to design richer products. This isn’t great for comparison or competition.

Expect to see investigations and fines and findings on these topics in future. I imagine there will be tale-telling by competitors on one another to deviations from the law will be spotted quickly.

There have been plenty of debate around the regulations, in part because of the dramatic financial and operational impact they will have, and partly because of how imperfectly worded they are and the scope for interpretation.

I’ll be posting about this more in the coming days.

Basing the premium on initial or outstanding balance

First, a real anomaly is the ability for insurers  to charge the capped premium rate either on initial loan balance or on the declining outstanding balance.

There are good practical reasons to want to charge a single, known amount to policyholders. It is easier to administer and policyholders have greater clarity on what they are paying.

The actual premium charged over the lifetime of a loan can be substantially higher where it is based on the initial balance rather than the declining balance, particularly for longer term loans. How a cap designed to moderate profits and improve value for money can allow such disparity is bizarre.

There is an interesting quirk here, which I hope is exploited to drive value for money and increased competition in the market. The credit life regulations require lenders to permit substitute policies where the policy meets the minimum regulatory required benefits. Where an insurer (or in practical terms, usually the lender) is charging a premium based on the initial loan balance, it becomes easier for a third party insurance company to offer a substitute policy at a cheaper rate, based on the lower actual sum assured partway through the loan or policy term.

I am not a fan of outright caps, although I recognise there are times when it might be the least bad regulatory intervention. The holy grail is a competitive market where consumers have access to information and providers compete for the business.  This will drive profit margins down to reasonable returns for the risk and capital required, and drive business into the arms of the operational cost (and distribution cost) competitive providers.

Those entities still charging on initial balance will actually help to drive this competitive market.

As much as I believe in the right of businesses to make money and make good money, value for money will be driven by competition and more of it is still needed.