Archive

  • Finding a consensus on IFRS 17 leverage ratios

    23 January 2023

    Some signs of agreement on how financial leverage will be presented under the new insurance contracts accounting standard are emerging, but options remain open, as Christopher Cundy reports

  • IFRS 17: still waiting for disclosures

    04 August 2022

    The IFRS 17 accounting standard is due to be implemented in five months' time, but many insurers are leaving it until the eleventh hour to reveal what impact the transition will have on their financial metrics. Christopher Cundy and Paul Walsh report

  • R.I.P. traditional life insurance

    11 July 2022

    Low interest rates killed off European life insurance products that offered policyholders guaranteed annual returns. Even now as rates rise, David Walker finds practitioners are ready to bury the concept

  • Bigger does not mean better for insurers

    02 June 2022

    Expanding an insurance business in good times typically meant growing profits. In today's tougher economic environment, Europe's largest insurers are being much more prudent about spending capital, and are only considering very careful expansion, as David Walker writes

  • It's life Oliver, but not as we knew it

    08 April 2022

    European life insurers' capital consumption used to give their CEOs indigestion. But the "capital-lite" diets of Allianz and others has transformed the business, as David Walker discovers

  • Worst days over for Europe's life insurers, says Fitch

    08 March 2022

    Allianz has become self-sustaining for capital on new life and health insuring

  • German mid-tier insurers post healthy 2020 numbers, but remain in Allianz's shadow

    23 March 2021

    Wertgarantie, Versicherungskammer Bayern and Alte Leipziger perform well despite coronavirus

  • Country profile: Germany

    16 March 2021

    Europe's third-largest insurance industry has survived the coronavirus pandemic so far, but continues to be plagued by low rates and poor profitability in motor and home cover, as David Walker describes in this special report featuring interviews with BaFin's Frank Grund and GDV's Jörg Asmussen

  • Germany's interest rate reserve gets bigger - and better

    07 January 2021

    German life insurers paid more into the Zinszusatzreserve again in 2020, despite the new "corridor method" of calculation that intended to unburden the sector. Industry leaders tell David Walker the ZZR remains fit for purpose nonetheless

  • Mounting ZZR contributions "appropriate" in current environment

    01 December 2020

    German trade association backs methodology revised in 2018