NETHERLANDS - The Dutch Actuarial Society has asked social affairs minister Aart Jan de Geus not to set rules for analysing pension funds.

A standardised regulation would lead to a decline in inventiveness and creativity within the very competitive actuarial consultancy market, the society – the Actuarieel Genootschap - said. It was responding to a ministerial implementation order on the new financial assessment framework nFTK.

“In our opinion, it is undesirable that the discussion about methods, principles and exceptions is being stopped by rules, which usually lead to normative behaviour,” the AG added.

The society has also suggested that pensions watchdog De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) will show a benevolent attitude to initiatives from the field, instead of having to acknowledge every internal model or used benchmark in advance.

“This raises an image of mistrust of the sector, which isn’t justified. There aren’t any known examples, in which the offered freedom has been deliberately abused. Moreover, the DNB already checks directors and actuaries in advance,” the AG stated.

“We want endorsement in retrospect. The DNB should check actuaries’ behaviour. It should have faith in them. It’s after all the DNB which licences the actuaries,” AG chairman Roland van den Brink explained to IPE. “Without some freedom, we can’t have an innovative market.”

According to the AG, prudence and market value should be strictly separated. “We would like to make it perfectly clear that rises, in connection with future uncertainties about the expectations, don’t belong within a market value, which in itself is an expectation,” it stressed. “Prudence should only apply to the judgment of the risks run by a pension fund.”

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