Some Countries Skip Insurer Systemic Risk Evaluations: IAIS

What You Need to Know

Twenty-six countries participated in the baseline assessment of implementation of IAIS systemic risk standards.
The IAIS Holistic Framework includes Insurance Core Principles.
Some world regulators don't believe the insurers they regulate pose any kind of threat to the financial system.

Regulators in many countries are skeptical about the idea that problems at insurance companies could rock the financial system.

Officials at the International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS) talk about that finding in a report on how well 26 IAIS member countries are implementing the new IAIS “Holistic Framework” — the Holistic Framework for the Assessment and Mitigation of Systemic Risk in the Insurance Sector.

The IAIS is a Basel, Switzerland-based group for the world’s insurance regulators.

Ever since the 2007-2009 Great Recession hit, IAIS members have been trying to come up with ways to keep future insurance company failures from hurting nations’ financial stability.

IAIS members acted on that effort in November 2019, by adopting the Holistic Framework. The 26 countries involved have done a good job of implementing the those standards, IAIS officials say, in a report on framework implementation.

Systemic Importance

The new report mentions one gap that relates to countries’ efforts to assess the potential risk importance of insurers and the insurance sector.

IAIS Insurance Core Principles 24.3 states that, “The [insurance] supervisor has an established process to assess the potential systemic importance of individual insurers and the insurance sector.”

But only 14 of the 26 countries surveyed have completed implementing the ICP 24.3 standards, officials say. When IAIS officials looked into why countries were not complying fully with ICP 24.3, some countries’ insurance regulators said they were in the process of implementing the standard.

In some other jurisdictions, officials said “that they did not view individual insurers nor the insurance sector as being systemic.”