Category archives: valuation

Capital implications of infrastructure assets for insurers under SAM

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 […]

Unbelievable Risk Discounts Rates

Setting discount rates is a crucial and subjective exercise. This is true for life insurance embedded values too. Many researchers are comfortable with a range for Equity Risk Premiums of between 3% and 5%. Many corporate finance practitioners use a range from 5% to 8% or even higher. My nearly eight-year-old blog post on mis-estimating […]

The future is not as old as we thought

Expectations of future UK life expectancy have declined for several years now. This is not to say that current life expectancy has decreased, but rather than estimates of future mortality improvements are being lowered, pushing down future estimated life expectancy. One report indicates this change may roll back a year of expected mortality improvements. So […]

SAM Risk-free Rate Workshop

The Technical Provisions Task Group and KPMG ran a workshop for industry participation on risk-free rates recently. The idea was to see whether we could improve the extent and quality of industry comment on key, controversial areas of the proposed SAM regime. Turnout was good, but not great, but the discussion and points raised were […]

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 […]

Greek default?

So European politicians have more or less agreed a deal which may, more or less, push some of their problems to one side for a period. Yes, I’m not madly optimistic about this as a cure-all.  This is not the end of the Euro problems. Part of the deal is a “50% loss for private […]