RNA Analytics: Modelling solutions for all purposes
John Bowers, consulting director, EMEA at RNA Analytics, discusses the regulatory challenges facing insurers. He explains how RNA Analytics can help with its global focus and bespoke approach
What are the main regulatory reporting priorities for your clients?
IFRS 17 is still the big topic, but various insurance markets are at different stages of readiness for it, which presents its own challenges. It is worth reiterating the entire purpose of IFRS 17 is to create comparability with the accounts, which of course all comes down to the transition.
Our specialist teams work with insurers to deliver the best approach for them, and whether that is full or partial retrospective or fair value. The question we still most often get asked from actuarial audiences is what do you mean by fair value? While fair value is theoretically fairly simple and the least resource intensive strategy, it still has its challenges.
I hope we are moving to a period now where we will start to see insurers pinning down their transitional methodologies, allowing sufficient time in their preparatory project planning as well as flexibility in their solutions.
Potentially, I think the transition process for IFRS 17 and that first reporting cycle will not be as smooth as insurers would like it to be – or as future reporting cycles will be. Without a good grasp of your transition numbers early on, then you do not know how your IFRS 17 numbers will look at all.
Next up for US insurers is LDTI, which is going to really alter the way insurers assess and report the financials for long-duration contracts. For a market that is typically reliant on black box type of systems, I’m interested to see how companies react to such a large-scale change.
We have US regulatory code for US GAAP, as well as capital and reserving statutory measures, and we will be developing code for LDTI in time.
How do you think insurance modelling will change over the next five years?
Insurance modelling is becoming more granular and more powerful, which is without a doubt thanks to the digital transformation we are experiencing, coupled with consultative approaches to solving customer pain points.
IFRS 17 is really adding a focus on this area too. The disclosures and information that emerge from this means there is great potential to add more management information than Solvency II. This, in turn, will help insurers develop more specific sales strategies and products.
All of this extra data needs extra computational power and that is where the transformative power of the cloud will really start to show its presence.
Does RNA Analytics plan to launch any new risk or capital management software tools?
We will soon be releasing a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. It will provide a modern, cloud-native service for running stochastic actuarial models as well as standard integrated reporting for IFRS 17 and other regulations, from one accessible and user-friendly platform.
This service will aim to solve many of the customer pain points, by creating the necessary solutions to load models and input data into the cloud simultaneously, with greater control of running and capacity, making for a more efficient system.
RNA Analytics also recently launched a non-life standard code library, which we are continuing to develop as we learn more about our customers’ needs.
We are also working on introducing areas of artificial intelligence-led tools to the product suite, again bolstering our existing offering and allowing for continual development of our services.
Why should insurers use RNA Analytics’ solutions?
RNA Analytics offers something truly unique in the fact that we have access to global resources and talent, but we deliver specialist products and services through localised teams of experts.
We offer a holistic, bespoke and personalised service. With that, comes a balance of technological and consultative elements, which allows our teams across the world to offer insurers a powerful advantage.
We have modelling solutions for all purposes, but our systems can also be seamlessly integrated with other third-party tools to ensure our clients get the best end-to-end experience. Our focus will always be our customers and offering solutions to their problems.
