Direct approach to assess risk adjustment under IFRS 17

Abstract

This paper aims to develop a method that can be adopted by insurers to assess the risk adjustment for nonfinancial risks (RA) required by International Financial Reporting Standards 17 (IFRS 17). Unlike other methods, the method proposed here directly returns the RA for each liability related to a group of insurance contracts: remaining coverage and incurred claims. Moreover, each portion of the RA is correctly allocated to the corresponding actuarial liability, which constitutes an advantage over other methods. The method follows IFRS 17 directives and contributes to standardize accounting practices of insurers around the world, thus increasing the degree of comparability between financial statements in different jurisdictions. This paper should be relevant for insurance companies, for insurance market supervisors and regulators, as well as for practitioners in general. The method takes advantage of the collective risk theory and of the Monte Carlo simulation technique to adjust probability distributions used to calculate two different loading factors that, when applied to the carrying amount of unearned premiums and to the expected present value of incurred claims, directly return the RA for each liability related to a group of insurance contracts: remaining coverage and incurred claims. Our results show that, for large-scale portfolios, the central limit theorem holds and the distributions used to assess the loading factors can be well approximated by the normal distribution. Additionally, the values obtained for each loading factor are small, which means that the RA is relatively low when compared to the carrying amount of unearned premiums and to the expected present value of incurred claims. This result is in line with the law of large numbers, which states that, for large-scale portfolios, the risk borne by the insurer becomes considerably lower, since it is easier to predict the behavior of aggregate future claims.