Infrastructure as an asset class is hardly a new idea. Retirement funds are attracted to the promise of higher turns, long-dated cash flows, and consistency with increasingly important ESG factors. Insurers, unlikely retirement funds, have to hold risk-based capital against the risks inherent in their investments. This makes it more difficult to underestimate the risks …
Continue reading “Capital implications of infrastructure assets for insurers under SAM”
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 …
Stress and scenario testing are important risk assessment tools. They also provide useful ways to prepare in advance for adverse scenarios so that management doesn’t have to create everything from first principles when something similar occurs. But trying to imagine scenarios, particularly very severe scenarios, isn’t straightforward. We don’t have many examples of very extreme …
The Black Death, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, wiped out 30 to 50 percent of Europe’s population between 1347 and 1351 Now, South Africa has been placed on high alert for a potential plague infection. Mortality rates are estimated anywhere between 30% and 100% without treatment. Many estimates are towards the top end of this …
Continue reading “Move over cholera, here’s the Black Death”
This reminded me a little of trying to come up with the “right” risk taxonomy or risk management framework. There are so many different ways to draw boundaries, none which is perfect and many which are acceptable and useful. Also, Star Wars.
I’ve been working with a few insurers and reinsurers on credit risk recently. We’ve had plenty of reasons to think about it, what with new regulations (SAM, Basel III) and South African government downgrades. However, sometimes I get the impression that credit risk is viewed as an academic risk, as something that happens to others, …
A few people have mentioned that they found my “live blogging” or tweeting of the 2013 LAC Seminar in Cape Town and Joburg useful. I used the hastag #LACseminar2013. I’m repeating all of them here in case they’re useful in a slightly more long-lived medium of my blog. I didn’t cover all the sessions – …
Continue reading “LAC Seminar 2013 live tweeting complete list”
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 …
Continue reading “The Perfect Storm Part 1 – IFRS reporting under SAM”
