We could read it in today´s papers: Global Banking regulators will press ahead with the first worldwide effort to force banks to hold more liquid assets and to cut back industry reliance on short term funding. The new Chairman of the Basel Committee on banking supervision has warned in his first interview in his new position. For European Insurance companies it is not different and probably pension companies will follow within two years. It is all about holding more capital against unexpected loss to protect beneficiaries and ensure financial stability.
Although we could foresee this (by the new Belgium governmental support for Dexia), it is not easy for banks to comply with Basel III and for European insurers to comply with Solvency II. That was exactly the reason for Software AG Benelux to organize a meeting between Solvency II Program directors to exchange their experiences: are you on planning, do you know how to comply, is everyone in the company working on the same objective? Do you have advises for other insurers?
This is why we approached our insurance contacts. We asked them to participate in a Roundtable on October 6 in Utrecht. The famous Karel V in Utrecht was the audience, this time not for knights to discuss their battle issues, but for program managers to talk about their battle issues.
With twelve representatives of eight different companies we summarized that:
- Complying to SII Directives at January 1 2013 is a challenge,
- the Dutch Supervisory again tries to be the best in class, requiring more from the Dutch insurance companies than is needed on European level,
- the Directive itself is still moving and changing, which is a huge challenge for the insurance companies,
- Solvency II should be approached from a holistic point of view, connecting people across the company. ERM, enterprise risk management, is an excellent basis for supervisory (pillar II of Solvency II)
A common language and repository to store a Single Point Of Truth is absolutely required. Most of the participants use ARIS for this, others have chosen on purpose not to use one tool yet.
In this session, both Generali and ASR gave their opinion about the new Solvency II Package of Software AG. Generali already bought the brand new package and is implementing it. Others will follow.
It was fun with the warming up exercise, doing a ´one million dollar quiz´ that everyone was eager to win. The questions were all about Solvency II and the number of correct answers was incredibly high.
It was even more interesting to see that the insurance companies at the end had four winners around the table, while I mentioned beforehand that I have only three bottles of wine for the winner(s). It looks like financial companies know exactly how to play with the rules of the game…
