The Forum strongly believes the directive represents an important step toward implementing an advanced supervisory and solvency framework which will help strengthen the European insurance industry. The Forum now urges the European Commission to introduce clear and effective implementing measures that will deliver the directive's basic principles.
Internal models should reflect the nature, scale and complexity of the underlying businesses; they should be proportional in sophistication to the materiality of the risks they cover. Materiality levels should be determined by stakeholders based on the model's purpose. Practical considerations for models include usability, reliability, timeliness, process effectiveness, systems and cost efficiency. There should be an acceptable tradeoff between accuracy and the various practical constraints.
Further, European supervisors considered the causes of failures (and near-failures) of a number of insurers and their analysis showed that the causes were mostly associated with inappropriate risk decisions resulting from underlying internal failures rather than inadequate capitalisation per se.
The Solvency II standard formula to calculate a company's Solvency Capital Requirement should present a balancing act between various targets such as simplicity, risk sensitivity and robustness. The CRO Forum believes the main principles of the current standard formula, namely to asses the sensitivity with respect to all material risk factors and to aggregate capital requirements allowing for diversification, are appropriate for this purpose and moreover set incentives towards risk mitigation strategies.
This presentation is based on research (Internal Models Benchmarking Study 2008) carried out on behalf of the Chief Risk Officer Forum by Oliver Wyman.
Risk capital charges in the Solvency II context reflect the 99.5% quantile on a 1-year horizon. The consistent application of risk capital charges in Solvency II to all sources of risk is imperative. Inconsistent application of risk charges creates perverse incentives for certain asset classes or insurance products.
as a basis for discussion on the implementing measures for articles 50-55 of the EU Solvency II Draft Directive. The CRO Forum advocates a principles-based approach: Section B of this paper establishes five main principles for public risk disclosure which should be adhered to by all undertakings.
The Emerging Risks Initiative of the Chief Risk Officers Forum is pleased to announce the publication of a new position paper called Critical Information Infrastructure. In industrialised societies, computers are interconnected to form a complex [...]
The CRO Forum companies have developed internal capital models, which they expect to be approved by the regulators as a basis for setting the level of target capital ('SCR'). The CRO Forum companies have also participated in QIS4.
This paper is part of a series of work by the CRO Forum under their Best Risk Management Practices initiative.The paper outlines important principles and considerations that should be part of best risk management practice for the management of liquidity risk within an insurance company. The primary focus of this paper is the management of liquidity risk where the company bears the risk, as opposed to the policyholder.
