IFRS 17's interactions with Solvency II life insurance case study

Abstract

In May 2017, the International Accounting Standards Board published an IFRS standard designed to be applied to insurance contracts: IFRS 17 Insurance Contracts. The new standard will replace the current applicable standard, IFRS 4. IFRS 17 will be enforceable from 1 January 2022, leaving insurers a little more than two years to implement it. In the first instance, this thesis explains the main requirements of the new standard largely based on the text published by the IASB. Moreover, as IFRS 17 is often compared to Solvency II, a comparison of both standards was carried out in order to ascertain whether it would be possible to leverage some elements of Solvency II to implement IFRS 17. Furthermore, the status of the progress of the implementation of IFRS 17 was also investigated. The main purpose of this investigation was to identify what insurance companies had already carried out and the various remaining steps they were using for the implementation of the standard Besides, the application of the standard was demonstrated through two practical examples. Finally, technical provisions (TPs) under the current regime (i.e. local GAAP) were computed to be compared to the TPs of IFRS 17 in order to measure whether the new standard does represent a significance difference in their computations.