Abstract Helmut Gründl discusses in his paper the effects of the present low interest rate environment on the German life insurance industry. By referring to a recent study of the “International Center for Insurance Regulation”, he assesses insolvency probabilities for life insurers with...

The valuation of insurance liabilities has traditionally been dealt with by actuaries, who closely monitored underlying illiquid features, assumed a long-term perspective, and exercised their own subjective, expert judgment. However, the new EU regulatory regime of Solvency II (S2) has come to...

Insurance companies issue guarantees that need to be valued according to the market expectations. By calibrating option pricing models to the available implied volatility surfaces, one deals with the so-called risk-neutral measure Q, which can be used to generate market consistent values for...

The European Union is completely redesigning the system of prudential supervision of insurance institutions as part of the Solvency Directive II. During its implementation, the Directive, which can be compared to the Basel II prudential standard, was analysed above all in terms of actuarial...