IAIS Revises Roadmap in Response to Ongoing COVID-19 Crisis

This Version 2.0 of the roadmap provides revised plans for all existing 2020-21 roadmap projects—in many cases to provide operational relief to member supervisors and insurers while they focus on responding to COVID-19 developments—and establishes new projects in response to the COVID-19 crisis. The updated roadmap includes the following three new projects:

• Follow up on the work of the Cyber Underwriting Small Group to develop, in 2020, a paper on cyber risk underwriting
• Supporting information exchange and analysis on regulatory, supervisory, and other financial policy measures being taken in response to COVID-19 by IAIS members
• Development of a risk dashboard to inform regular discussions on the key developments in financial markets affecting the global insurance industry due to the COVID-19 crisis 

Many projects in the roadmap, even while keeping their overall objective unchanged, are challenged by the COVID-19 situation and have seen their timelines, interim goals, and scope adjusted for 2020. The updated roadmap plans have been developed in a way that continues to progress IAIS activities, while providing operational relief to insurers through, for example, delaying timelines for data calls, surveys, and public consultations. Other key highlights include the following:

• The annual 2020 Global Monitoring Exercise, or GME, has been postponed to 2021. In 2020, IAIS will utilize the framework it has developed in recent years for forward-looking risk assessment (the GME) to undertake a targeted assessment of the impact of COVID-19 on the global insurance sector. This assessment will be based on targeted COVID-19 data collections. The COVID-19 data collections, which will have a quantitative and a qualitative component, will be collected from both insurance groups (Individual Insurers Monitoring, or IIM) and member supervisors (Sector-Wide Monitoring, or SWM) and will focus on key indicators such as assets, liabilities, solvency, liquidity, and profitability of the global insurance sector. 
• IAIS will review and adjust the timelines for the ICS confidential reporting in 2020 as well as the Aggregation Method data collection. As a first step, the submission deadline will be extended to October 31, to provide operational relief to participating insurers, with submissions done on a best effort basis.
• Timelines have been adjusted for various consultations, including the paper on the development of the liquidity metrics and the application papers on liquidity risk management, on macro-prudential supervision, on climate risk in the insurance sector, on resolution powers and planning, and on supervision of control functions.

Keywords: International, Insurance, Roadmap, Cyber Risk, COVID-19, Reporting, Global Monitoring Exercise, ICS, Liquidity Risk, Resolution Framework, Macro-Prudential Supervision, IAIS