PwC paper - Solvency II Pillar II "operational issues of risk management"

Following on from KMPG's efforts, the PwC crew have released their own aide-memoire for Pillar II specialists, which at the very least should be handy for CRO/Head of Risk etc amongst us for board training/briefing ideas as we approach the home straight.

At 60 pages, it's not exactly a comic, and while a great deal of the introductory material is 'Pillar 2 101', it does contain material (either text or schematics) which should be of immediate use, so I would recommend checking out;

• First line of defence and reasons for risk ownership (p26)
• Definitions of Risk Appetite/Risk Tolerance/Risk Profile/Risk Limits/Risk Budget (p35) - I haven't cross referenced these against IRM definitions for example, but may be worth doing for consistency. An accompanying schematic is on p36.
• Internal Model Scope (p40) and Validation (p48) should be extremely topical after Mr Adams's speech on Thursday.
• Communications and training plan ideas (p53-54)
• ORSA schematic, and some talk around process industrialisation (p56)

Perhaps the main weakness in the text is that there are no references to the Commission's draft Level 2 text, which is now clearly a document in a lot of people's hands (not least the FSA, who have made it clear that this plus the Directive text is what IMAP is based on). I also wasn't mad keen on the reference to P&L attribution being "the real risk profile" (p48) - there is already enough flab around this term without additional mis-steers.

All in all, well worth dissecting, even if like a Roast Pigeon, you end up throwing away more than you consume!

PS - Far be it from me to suggest a document from one of the Big 4 has a whiff of Google Translate about it, but this was authored almost entirely by PwC France it would appear, perhaps explaining the odd COSO-ERM reference on p17, the rather oblique title, and of course, the whopping 60 pages...

PPS - Wife is French, so allowed the odd cheap gag around bureaucracy!