The Edinburgh Reforms, launched by the government in December 2022, represent an extensive package of regulatory reforms to the UK Financial Services sector, aimed to support the government’s ambitions for the UK to be the “world’s most innovative and competitive global financial centre.” The Edinburgh Reforms are also being framed as an opportunity to take advantage of “Brexit freedoms” to build a smarter regulatory framework.

A collection of initiatives, addressing a number of regulations across the full financial services sector, sees several consultations and calls for evidence already launched. Those in the GI insurance sector will be particularly interested in the updates related to the long-discussed ‘Brexit-benefit’ of the reforms to Solvency II: what this means as regards capital requirements, permitted investable assets, the SMCR regime and, of course the expectations of the market related to its, arguably regulatory-imposed, role as shaping and driving the initiatives to transition the UK’s economy and society to a greener, more sustainable one.

As ICSR identified in its preliminary article – Solvency II to Solvency UK – Proposed Treasury Reforms – the intended outcomes of the reforms, taken at face value, will be welcomed by GI insurers. Reduced reporting requirements, greater investment flexibility and the potential for more competitive pricing sound attractive, but as ever the devil is in the detail and considering these more closely may lead one to hold a slightly more reserved position on the benefits to be gained at this very early stage.

Risk Margin – How Material Is The Benefit?

Take the headline-grabbing reduction to the risk margin, a sure win with 30% and 65% reductions being permitted for GI and Life insurers respectively; with the intended benefit being that this would allow industry to invest in a wider array of assets. The government’s decision not to apply the credit risk charge proposed by the PRA, the fundamental spread calculation, also seeks to enable companies to free up billions to be reinvested in sustainable financing.

This has been welcomed by early respondents to the announcement, but let’s assume an average allocation to the risk margin being around 10% of technical provisions what it means in reality is a freeing  up of only an extra 3% of capital to be invested by the GI sector.

The recognised risk that these funds might be returned to shareholders appears, at this time, unfounded from the responses to the government consultation. That said, the released capital might be preferably used to finance some internal operational enhancements by insurers, for example around improved data collection and mining capabilities or it may be used to invest in other growth initiatives. The drive for competitiveness and growth by the reforms are, after all, designed in part to ensure the regulatory framework supports technology and innovation.

It’s no secret that the insurance sector lags behind its Financial Services counterparts as regards technology and data exploitation and in order to effect transition/sustainability objectives, data-capture facilities must be improved by insurers. In the short term at least, any released funds from capital held may be funnelled into operational enhancements internally to achieve macro objectives in the medium to long term.

We also know that the government’s intention is to direct investment into sustainable finance and infrastructure and as the insurance industry ultimately complies with this objective, so asset portfolios will be adjusted. The opportunity to invest in longer term, higher risk assets is something already being seen as insurers’ portfolios are being reviewed to meet the requirements of PRA Supervisory Statement 3/19 and addressing climate change.

While the greater flexibility to invest capital is likely to be welcomed by firms, again, it will come with additional operational considerations which, in the short term, will require significant executive discussion and potential changes to reporting and oversight obligations. As an industry, insurers’ asset portfolios are currently broadly conservative, necessarily featuring low risk, easily liquidated assets in accordance with the prudent person principles.

Modifying portfolios to include more illiquid assets, less available at short notice, has the potential to directly impact liquidity and could compromise an insurer’s ability to meet its liabilities as they fall due. Any, and all, changes must be managed carefully as part of any modification to liquidity strategy and can be expected to be subject to close scrutiny by the regulators.

Monitoring security and quality of assets, ensuring they are adequately diversified and localised, and are broadly matched to liabilities will be key reportable information internally and likely of interest externally also.

It should be anticipated that, during a period where the whole insurance market is tackling this adjustment, regulators will require evidence of robust analysis – possibly through some market-wide stress testing – to demonstrate the ongoing strength and resilience of both individual firms and the industry as a whole, as changes to portfolios are enacted.

Regardless of how these released funds might be employed there are operational considerations to be made and could include:

• determine whether the capital model needs to be re-parameterised;
• stress tests will likely need to be re-articulated to determine the new capital levels/asset-liability duration matching positions are still sufficient;
• validation exercises amended to capture these changes to the model;
• principal risk appetite statements reassessed to ensure they remain aligned with strategic positions.

Linked to this, the government announced it will commence, during the first quarter of 2023, its consultation on bringing Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings providers into regulatory jurisdiction. The Treasury will also join the industry-led ESG Data and Ratings Code of Conduct Working Group, recently convened by the FCA, as an observer. This was expected as part of the suite of reforms, although the overall impact to the sector remains to be seen at this time.

The use of ESG data and ratings services is becoming more extensive by firms to inform investment decisions and to assess sustainability risks. For the aforementioned reasons, the government wants to ensure that there is transparency around the methodologies of ratings, good governance and sound conflict management, as these increasingly become the cornerstone of decision-making related to sustainability strategies.

The immediate implications of this announcement will primarily concern those parties providing the data but will obviously have consequences to individual insurance companies consuming it. Understanding, for example, the drivers behind ESG ratings and how they are aggregated to inform the overall assessment is vital when being used to take decisions.

There have already been examples of multi-national organisations’ ESG ratings being negatively impacted due to certain governance issues, while their environmental and social efforts have been mostly progressive relative to the market. Such a reduction in a company’s ESG rating could materially impact the adherence to asset portfolio appetites and tolerances for individual companies, triggering time-consuming and unnecessary escalation processes if the underlying drivers were clearly shared and interpreted by ratings services.

SMCR Regime – An Unexpected Focus

One area of focus within the reforms did come as a surprise to the market and that was the government’s intention to review the SM&CR regime. The government intend to launch a Call for Evidence to collect views on the regime’s effectiveness, scope and proportionality and also to seek views on potential improvements and reforms. It is understood that the FCA and PRA will also review the regulatory framework and are expected to publish their findings during Q1 2024.

What does this mean for insurers? While we anticipate that changes to the requirements for Core firms may be limited, Enhanced firms may benefit from a more focussed set of expectations, being easier to document and evidence.  Beyond that, we would suggest that is unclear at the moment, but if some of the criticisms of the current framework are contemplated, it could be hoped that the clearer direction for the identification of staff who need to be certified might be one of the changes, for instance.

A clear winner at this point would be an improvement in the time which it takes the PRA and FCA to approve individuals. Of all of the complaints we have heard from firms this is the most common and frequent. The regime would work considerably better if the regulators were able to improve their performance on this issue. The second complaint is the administrative burden it places on medium to smaller firms.

Solvency UK v Solvency II

Stepping back to consider the gamut of reforms more holistically, the reforms don’t appear to represent a material divergence from EIOPA’s objective to ensure Solvency II remains fit for purpose, with the 2020 review of the directive resulting in no fundamental changes, but with a small number of adjustments to the risk margin, volatility adjustment and treatment of interest rate risk. These appear to broadly align with the government’s Solvency II reform proposals and the common vision of both the UK and European regulators that their respective insurance sectors should lead the transition to a greener economy.

While this should translate into minimal divergence of practices and reporting requirements for insurers with operations in both the UK and Europe. In practical terms, it is sensible to assume there may some differences. For international firms operating centralised risk, compliance, finance and investment functions there will be a need to ensure these differences are recognised and managed. The competitive edge these reforms are designed to afford the UK sector remains to be borne out over time.

As these reforms progress, consultations and calls for evidence are completed, ICSR will be continue to consider what this means for the insurance sector and share our advice related to the inevitable additional workload these represent. 

If you have any questions about the Edinburgh Reforms generally, or more specifically, how the themes above may impact your company, please speak with Claire King.