17 March 2006

CEIOPS issues QIS 1 Summary Report

CEIOPS issued a summary report on the first Quantative Impact Study on solvency II. The foremost general conclusions are that the best estimate plus risk margin tends to be less than the provisions on current bases, and that the risk margins tend to be small, for most undertakings and classes of business.

By comparison, for non-linked life the future bonuses seem to have a much larger impact on the required provisions than the risk margin in most countries, and for non-life the effect of discounting is relatively large for some classes of business.

The impact study also provides a good insight into the methodological issues that the requested calculations provide. For life undertakings the calculation of future bonuses was handled very differently by undertakings, in part because of differing national regulations. Further, the stochastic modelling of financial guarantees and the calculation of risk margins gave problems for a significant number of life undertakings, nonetheless the problems varied with the country. Life undertakings especially requested more guidance. For non-life the undertakings applied very differing approaches, though the outcomes tended to be similar nonetheless.

The results cannot be considered representative for the EEA as a whole, however. Not all countries chose to participate, and in the countries that did participate there tends to be a size bias. It is to be expected that especially the smaller undertakings are the ones with a stronger national component, so that information on the impact of the required calculations on their technical provisions should give a better indication on the effects for a national market than the information of larger, internationally oriented undertakings. Finally, for the optional questions very little information was received.

Full report

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