Risk engines, together with economic scenario generators and actuarial modelling systems, are major technological building blocks for Solvency II compliance, especially for those companies planning to use an internal capital model. Risk engines aggregate information from multiple sources and calculate exposures and capital requirements for management and regulatory reporting. In essence, they are data processors, and therefore the infrastructure around them, particularly the data management, is key to how effectively they function.
Solvency II and evolving best practice now demand that the infrastructure and the risk engine processes are as formalised and robust as possible, while at the same time providing maximum transparency, flexibility and performance. As a result, insurers have been upgrading their technology in this area in order to respond to these challenges.
Italy’s Unipol Group is a good example of an insurer that has been enhancing and formalising its risk technology infrastructure in response to Solvency II. After many years of what it calls a “laboratory-style” approach to risk analysis, Unipol decided it was imperative for the company to build a corporate risk and capital calculation platform. The first practical consideration was to build a single repository for all the data necessary to feed the risk and capital calculation engines in a structured and controlled way. This, says Mario Bocca, Unipol Group chief information officer, led immediately to the issue of data quality – the ability to guarantee the accuracy, completeness and appropriateness of data feeding the risk analysis engines from whatever source in the company.
Data quality management and integration capabilities were as critical to the selection of the package as its risk aggregation and reporting, and ability to interface with other third-party analytics applications, says Marco Zaccanti, IT project manager for Unipol’s Solvency II project.
Christophe Burckbuchler, product manager, enterprise risk solutions for insurers at California-based Moody’s Analytics, comments: “The [Solvency II] Directive has really set out the strictest data management requirements. Insurers and reinsurers need to demonstrate that the data they are using is accurate, appropriate and complete. This is no easy task given the sheer volume of policy data scattered across the organisation in legacy systems.”
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