The EU's long awaited package to cover capital adequacy rules and other legislation for the insurance industry could make the grade as a model for applications around the world, if ambitions expressed at launch presentations in Brussels and Strasbourg are anything to go by.
The Solvency II draft directive takes in various new concepts, including its rational approach to risk assessment, plus its pioneering approach to its governance. These developments have their roots in co-operation between the experts in the European Commission and their counterparts at the International Association of Insurance Supervisors, based at Basel.
In a recent paper, "Common Structure For The Assessment Of Insurer Solvency" (February 2007), the association engages with key subjects areas that are also common to the EU's Solvency II. For instance, it deals with "the assessment of the financial position of an insurer for supervision purposes, the [requirement of] available capital…and how technical provisions and capital requirements may be determined and calibrated". The paper talks of a more precise approach as to how a solvency regime should operate.
Speaking to IPE, Michel Flamée, chairman of the IAIS executive committee, expressed satisfaction that Solvency II was in line with the association lines. The EU was taking a truly economic approach of insurance companies to the realities of risk, he said. It was also taking in material for constructing its supervisory system.
Flamée is also a board member of the Committee of European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Supervisors (CEIOPS), and is chair of its convergence committee, added that the next step on the road to Solvency II will be the qualitative impact study (QIS) number three, expected in October.
Implications for pension investment from the eventual adoption of Solvency II into national codes in are the likely release from the currently over-padded reserves of insurance companies, especially the majors, into the investment market. The release from the buffer funds will be largely from the life side of insurance. However, guesses at figures are said to be impossible to assess yet.
Arguments in favour of the Solvency II upgrade appear to be overwhelming. The Commission notes that the current EU solvency system is over 30 years old. As a result of lack of a lead position on regulation, many EU member nations have introduced their own additional rules at national level, leading to a range of different regulatory requirements.
Currently, EU solvency requirements only cover insurance risks, whereas in future insurers would be required to hold capital also against market risk, credit risk and operational risk. All these risk types pose material threats to insurers' solvency but are not covered by the current EU system.
Insurers would also be required to focus on the active identification, measurement and management of risks, and to consider any future developments, such as new business plans or the possibility of catastrophic events, that might affect their financial standing.
Under the new system, insurers would need to assess their capital needs in light of all risks by means of the ‘Own Risk and Solvency Assessment'. The ‘Supervisory Review Process' (SRP) would shift supervisors' focus from compliance monitoring and capital to evaluating insurers' risk profiles and the quality of their risk management and governance systems.
In addition, the new system would enable insurance groups to be supervised more efficiently, through a ‘group supervisor' in the home country that would have specific responsibilities to be exercised in close co-operation with the relevant national supervisors.
However, Solvency II, does not face a clear run yet. Early this year, Karel van Hulle, head of the European Commission's insurance and pensions unit, hoped that it might clear through the European Parliament and Council of Ministers for adoption by 2009, "so it would not be unreasonable to forecast implementation following by 2010 to 2011". Now the Commission's estimate has slipped forward to 2012.
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