PwC, Central Bank of Ireland - ORSA Briefing

For anyone who just cant wait for the ORSA public consultation next month, PwC and the Central Bank of Ireland have clubbed together to publish this presentation on ORSA (given last week).

From the CBoI section I would flag;

• Firms already have "some" of the components of ORSA in place - in a country where the Financial Condition Report is alive and kicking, you might expect more confidence than that!
• Most of the rest of CBoI's presentation very plain vanilla - concerning if you are looking for firm guidance.
• Not sure how the Q&A went - if anyone attended, I'd love to know!

From the altogether more monied PwC, I would flag;

• Nice process maps that should visualise the suite of work that will ultimately comprise of an end-to-end ORSA process, including the reporting which spews out of the back end.
• A decent attempt at prescribing an ORSA Report structure (of course, if you have seen one punt from the consultancy firms at an "ORSA Report", you have seen them all, buit this does elaborate on each section).

Useful for anything you can extract from it, most concerning perhaps is the divergence in certainty and standard of presentation between the big 4 consultant and the regulator.

Irish Corporate Governance - Elderfield in business

Doing some recapping of bits I didn't expand on from late last week - in particular, there was an explosion of governance related material on the Irish side, as below;

Matthew Elderfield keynote speech in Galway- Introducing PRISM to the world

http://www.financialregulator.ie/press-area/speeches/Pages/AddressbyMatthewElderfieldtoGalwayChamberGMIT05May2011.aspx

The telling quote here was;

" Based on [international best practice review] and our own experience we will assess credit risk, market risk, operational risk, insurance risk, liquidity risk, capital risk, environmental risk and conduct risk at our firms going forward, in addition to the business model and governance risks... " 

This is of course considerably more in the world of categories than Solvency II asks for in both capital allocation and governance policy terms

Matthew Elderfield press comments

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/05/06/uk-ireland-regulator-idUKTRE7450XI20110506?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

http://www.irishexaminer.com/business/kfojmhgbeyid/rss2/

Central Bank of Ireland shutting down the sales force of a non-compliant insurance undertaking

http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/51-jobs-to-go-as-combined-insurance-to-stop-all-sales-activity-2639220.html

Quinn Insurance investigation - no Actuarial function in house before it collapsed due to pricing errors!

http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/administrators-note-lack-of-an-actuary-at-quinn-insurance-2639222.html

All balled together, this is one kitchen which is getting inescapably hot - the price one has to pay for low corporation tax I guess...