News & Views

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.

We’ve previously considered why IFRS 4 wasn’t ideal in terms of insurance company profit reporting, and given a brief introduction to its replacement IFRS 17. In this month’s article we look at IFRS 17 in a bit more detail, starting with the Building Blocks Approach.

2018 has got off to a fast start – we have already seen a high level of demand from clients in a range of areas, and are anticipating a very busy year. We look at some of the factors fuelling this demand.

Over the past two years, APR has provided training services to the actuarial staff of nine clients across the Life and GI sectors, primarily in the core technical areas of Excel and VBA; building on the success of these courseswe are now expanding the range of training we are able to provide to clients.

It is now approaching a year since APR employed our first CAA-level Actuarial Analysts, so we thought this would be a good time to share our experiences, look at how our CAA cohort might develop and, not too shamelessly, give a bit of a sales pitch to potential clients and analyst recruits.

Chris Nash gives us his report on this years EUSprig (European Union Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group) Conference. It was here that he attended a series of lectures on a variety of spreadsheet related topics such as developing spreadsheets with three or more dimensions and whether or not digital natives are spreadsheet natives.