Internal Models - more "Hassel" than they are worth?

Pardon the dodgy David Hasselhoff pun (product of an idle mind!), but it looks like a storm is brewing with out German pals on the internal modelling front - hot on the heels of Hannover Re's threat to abandon ship via a Societas Europaea passport to an easier ride, Gothaer, a German mutual, has now apparently decided to give up altogether.

Whilst the knowledge that people are giving up part-way through is not new (the UK managed to slim down from 100+ expected to 70-odd pre-applications between 2010-11), I was under the impression that Bafin were not dealing with a huge number to start with (this seems to suggest no more than a dozen), so to see two teetering on the brink is newsworthy I guess. 

It could be that these guys have seen something in the Commission's draft Level 2 that they don't like, or indeed the outcome of the ECON lobbying didn't quite go there way, but anything which leads to insurers not measuring their overall solvency needs using their own experience analysis and calibrations is surely unwelcome.

Some good quotes on just how onerous Bafin may be are included in this article (subscriber only I'm afraid), the most telling perhaps being "So far we see very few small insurers building an internal model [or partial model],". Very few, minus one, it would appear...