News & Views

With the first legs of the 2019 Champions League quarter finals about to kick off, what were the chances of an all-English tie when the draw was made, or indeed two, or none at all. The maths behind calculating these probabilities is relatively straightforward, but what about simulating the various scenarios in a model?

In this month’s IFRS 17 article Ajay Kotecha looks at the final building block in the set – the time value of money (or effect of discounting), including what the standard says about the methodology to use and some of the complexities around calculation.

APR offers all employees 1% of their work time to support “a good cause such as a voluntary organisation or to a local community project”. Adam Smith describes how he made use of this allowance to support the Teach First Futures scheme.

Over the course of 2018 we posted a number of articles aimed at introducing the key features and concepts of IFRS 17 to help Nearly / Newly Qualified Actuaries get to grips with this new accounting standard. Our next article looking at discounting will be out shortly, but in the meantime we thought it might be helpful to give a brief summary / reminder of the articles published so far.

Having got to grips with the Contractual Service Margin, in our latest IFRS 17 article we look at the Risk Adjustment – another building block which is designed to cover the usual variability of future cash flows around the best estimate over the lifetime of a product.

All of the results from the autumn actuarial exams are now in, and with an overall pass rate of over 75% across all exams sat the results for the Autumn exam season have seen APR’s staff demonstrate their quality once again.

On 30 October 2018, 22 APR staff, contractors and three partners raised a record sum of £10,738 for five charities of their choice simply by attending work that day. Read more about this year’s APR Charitable Initiative here.

European Insurers have raised a number of concerns over the new IFRS 17 accounting standard to the IASB. At the beginning of September, the EFRAG Board sent a letter to the IFRS Foundation listing the issues that required further thought – we take a look at some of these issues.

On a recent client project, Chris was introduced to the EU directive MiFID II. In this article he explains the scope and remit of the directive and discusses his experience of producing MiFID II disclosure statements, thereby demonstrating the importance of balancing complexity with clarity.

Having given an overview of the building blocks approach in our last IFRS 17 article, this month we look in a bit more detail at the contractual service margin, a new concept introduced by IFRS 17 as a means of smoothing the projected profit of an insurance contract over its duration.