KPMG Survey - Solvency II Benchmarking Survey

Decent piece released by the guys at KPMG covering Solvency II benchmarking. No difficulties in picking out the salient points, so just serve yourselves, but I've hauled some out for my own benefit (NB at 18 in the sample, its a tad light).

For my money, the 40% who feel their budgets are not on track feels instinctively light, but then the survey was taken in September before an extra year was stuck on it! The priorities and areas of concern (documentation, ORSA and governance) all seem fair in relation to other media, and the difference between small company projects (two-thirds resourced internally) and larger insurers (over 90%) in their staffing shows where the extra year's project costs may disproportionately fall. Also 56% feel they still have a lot to do on Pillar 3 (bit easier after last week's papers were released by EIOPA).

On the actuarial front, some very varied responses to Risk Margin calculation, and they flagged ORSA as the main area of cross-functional collaboration. They have also flagged Strategic, Liquidity and Reputational Risk as the main non-modelled risks going into ORSA.

The last section on validation is perhaps the real eye-opener - KPMG advise separating validation from production, and even with this small sample, a range of routes being used (on validation responsibility, ownership of the validation team, and responsibility for producing the validation report, including for the first time in my experience, the roping-in of Internal Audit)!