Update from the Chair of the Life Practice Executive Committee

The FSA expert on recovery and resolution plans for insurers joined us to outline the FSA's thinking on these and to lead a discussion.  At present the regulator does not feel it has sufficient confidence that continuity of cover would be provided if an insurer became insolvent.  It is crucial that there recovery and resolution plans are introduced in a way that is effective from the perspective of the regulator, the protection of our customers and of insurers.  We had a really good discussion where we fed in our initial thoughts on this and have set up a sub-group of the Practice Executive to lead further discussions with the regulator.  If you have any comments that you would like to feed in to these discussions, please forward them to Craig.Ajimuda@actuaries.org.uk.

We have almost finalised the agenda for the CILA 1 conference on 1 May and, from my perspective, it looks good.  There is a link to this under Upcoming Events, and I hope you agree with my view.  Preparations are also well underway for the Life Conference in Edinburgh in November.  The organising committee, under the chair of Chris Reynolds, is working very hard to ensure a wide-ranging and high quality programme.

In terms of research, we had a very good response to our recent advert for members of new working parties on the closure of with-profits funds and on the role of actuaries in life office so are very positive about the potential output from these Working Parties.  We also agreed that we would like to initiative some thinking on the needs of tomorrow's consumers and will be looking for volunteers for this in the near future; so watch this space.

In terms of Solvency II and ICAS+, we discussed progress in a range of areas from the Long Term Guarantee Impact Assessment (where we are highlighting to the regulator our views on the options being considered), early warning indicators (where are actively engaged with the FSA on how these might work most effectively), through to the ICAS+ regime (where we hope to be able to communicate further to members on how this might differ in practice from the current ICA regime).  We are also feeding in to a paper on market consistency that is being prepared for the Group Consultatif, which considers the theoretical rationale for a marker consistent approach, the practical hurdles, and how those hurdles might be overcome.  We have a meeting with Paul Sharma at the end of April where we will be discussing a wide range of these issues.

Alastair Clarkson
Chair, Life Practice Executive Committee
March 2013