Risk Appetite Statements and Solvency II project planning - Milliman and Ireland, douze points!

Not content with hustling the Irish insurance industry towards quality (legally required) Risk Appetite Statements this time last year, Mike Claffey has repeated the trick with another quality breakfast briefing on reviewing those very same risk appetite statements!

I like his approach to defining tolerances (acceptable variances) and limits (hard maximum/minimums gross and net of controls), which most practitioners should be able to roll with (alternative ideas are covered in a recent post), as well as a glorious slide with my old favourite, the 3 StDevs!

There is of course a suite of utility here for non-Ireland based practitioners, particularly for ORSA (scenario testing, business planning, financial condition reporting etc etc), so I recommend a leaf through, and to get hooked up to Mike's twitter feed if you haven't already done so.

Of as much utility to anyone who has been slow off the mark with their Solvency II planning (or who has been waiting, fingers crossed for a 2015 kick-off!) is a presentation by another of Milliman's finest on what to do in 2012 to avoid Solvency II project failure.

Nicely split into pillars, the priorities all seem fair, although one would expect 2012 to be the tying-up process, rather than commencement, of Pillar 1 activity on data requirements, documentation etc (or else what did you spend your cash on last year!). I also don't think targeting 14 weeks for results turnaround is necessary at present, bearing in mind the commission have got transitionals built in to their draft Level 2 text to give us until 2017 to get to this turnaround time (these guys may know something I don't however)...

For Pillar 2, the list of "required policies" in the slideshow looked very light indeed, but this may be becasue it is focused on 2012 priorities - Remuneration Policy can probably wait until 2013, eh! The other pieces on ORSA and Pillar 3 are all fair, so don't be afraid to check off against these, whether in Ireland or elsewhere.

Well done lads, and keep up the good work.