SUMMARY OF SIGNIFICANT ACCOUNTING POLICIES
Critical accounting estimates and judgements in applying accounting policies
In the application of the Company’s accounting policies, which are described above in these financial statements, management is required to make judgments, estimates and assumptions about the carrying amounts of assets and liabilities that are not readily apparent from other sources. The estimates and associated assumptions are based on historical experience and other factors that are considered to be relevant. Actual results may differ from these estimates. The estimates and underlying assumptions are reviewed on an ongoing basis. Revisions to accounting estimates are recognised in the period in which the estimate is revised if the revision affects only that period or in the period of the revision and future period if the revision affects both the current and future periods. The following are the key assumptions concerning the future, and other key sources of estimation uncertainty at the end of the reporting period, that have significant risk of causing a material adjustment to the carrying amounts of assets and liabilities within the next financial year.
Measurement of the expected credit loss allowance
Key concepts in IFRS 9 that have the most significant impact and require a high level of judgment, as considered by the Company while determining the impact assessment, are:
The assessment of a significant increase in credit risk is done on a relative basis. To assess whether the credit risk on a financial asset has increased significantly since origination, the Company compares the risk of default occurring over the expected life of the financial asset at the reporting date to the corresponding risk of default at origination, using key risk indicators that are used in the Company’s existing risk management processes.
The measurement of expected credit losses for each stage and the assessment of significant increases in credit risk must consider information about past events and current conditions as well as reasonable and supportable forecasts of future events and economic conditions. The estimation and application of forward-looking information will require significant judgment.
The definition of default used in the measurement of expected credit losses and the assessment to determine movement between stages will be consistent with the definition of default used for internal credit risk management purposes. IFRS 9 does not define default but contains a rebuttable presumption that default has occurred when an exposure is greater than 90 days past due.
When measuring ECL, the Company must consider the maximum contractual period over which the Company is exposed to credit risk. All contractual terms should be considered when determining the expected life, including prepayment options and extension and rollover options. For certain revolving credit facilities that do not have a fixed maturity, the expected life is estimated based on the period over which the Company is exposed to credit risk and where the credit losses would not be mitigated by management action.
Insurance and reinsurance contracts
The Company applies the PAA to simplify the measurement of insurance contracts. When measuring liabilities for remaining coverage, the PAA is broadly similar to the Company’s previous accounting treatment under IFRS 4. However, when measuring liabilities for incurred claims, the Company now discounts cash flows that are expected to occur more than one year after the date on which the claims are incurred and includes an explicit risk adjustment for non-financial risk.
Liability for remaining coverage
For insurance acquisition cash flows, the Company is eligible and chooses to capitalise all insurance acquisition cashflows upon payments.
The effect of recognising insurance acquisition cash flows as an expense on initial recognition of group of
insurance contracts are to increase the liability for remaining coverage on initial recognition and reduce the likelihood of any subsequent onerous contract loss. There would be an increased charge to profit or loss on initial recognition, due to expensing acquisition cash flows, offset by an increase in profit released over the coverage period. For groups of contracts that are onerous, the liability for remaining coverage is
determined by the fulfillment cash flows.
Liability for incurred claims
The ultimate cost of outstanding claims is estimated by using a range of standard actuarial claims projection techniques, such as Chain Ladder and Bornheutter-Ferguson methods.
The main assumption underlying these techniques is that a Company’s past claims development experience can be used to project future claims development and hence ultimate claims costs. These methods extrapolate the development of paid and incurred losses, average costs per claim (including claims handling costs), and claim numbers based on the observed development of earlier years and expected loss ratios. Historical claims development is mainly analysed by accident years, but can also be further analysed by geographical area, as well as by significant business lines and claim types. Large claims are usually separately addressed, either by being reserved at the face value of loss adjuster estimates or separately projected in order to reflect their future development. In most cases, no explicit assumptions are made regarding future rates of claims inflation or loss ratios. Instead, the assumptions used are those implicit in the historical claims development data on which the projections are based. Additional qualitative judgement is used to assess the extent to which past trends may not apply in future, (e.g., to reflect one-off occurrences, changes in external or market factors such as public attitudes to claiming, economic conditions, levels of claims inflation, judicial decisions and legislation, as well as internal factors such as portfolio mix, policy features and claims handling procedures) in order to arrive at the estimated ultimate cost of claims that present the probability weighted expected value outcome from the range of possible outcomes, taking account of all the uncertainties involved.
Other key circumstances affecting the reliability of assumptions include variation in interest rates, delays in settlement and changes in foreign currency exchange rates.
Discount rates
The Company use bottom-up approach to derive the discount rate. Under this approach, the discount rate is determined as the risk-free yield, adjusted for differences in liquidity characteristics between the financial assets used to derive the risk-free yield and the relevant liability cash flows (known as an illiquidity premium). The risk-free rate was derived using swap rates available in the market denominated in the same currency as the product being measured. When swap rates are not available, highly liquid sovereign bonds with a credit rating were used. Management uses judgment to assess liquidity characteristics of the liability cash flows.
Discount rates applied for discounting of future cash flows are listed below:
1 year | 3 years | 5 years | 10 years | 20 years | ||||||
2023 | 2022 | 2023 | 2022 | 2023 | 2022 | 2023 | 2022 | 2023 | 2022 | |
Insurance contracts issued | 6.66 | 6.02 | 5.72 | 5.66 | 5.35 | 5.46 | 5.02 | 5.19 | 5.36 | 5.10 |
Reinsurance contracts held | 6.66 | 6.02 | 5.72 | 5.66 | 5.35 | 5.46 | 5.02 | 5.19 | 5.36 | 5.10 |
Risk adjustment for non-financial risk
The Company uses a Solvency II (Value at risk) type approach to determine its risk adjustment for non-financial risk. Each portfolio is matched with the most representative Solvency II LOB and an assumption is made that the prescribed standard deviation of premiums risk and reserves risk for a given Solvency II LOB is representative of the standard deviation of the portfolio LRC and LIC standard deviation respectively. Further, the Company assumes that the LRC and LIC each have a Lognormal distribution with the LIC mean matching the sum of the IBNR, OS and ULAE while the LRC mean matches the UPR of a given portfolio. The risk adjustment for non-financial risk is the compensation that the Company requires for bearing the uncertainty about the amount and timing of the cash flows of groups of insurance contracts. The risk adjustment reflects an amount that an insurer would rationally pay to remove the uncertainty that future cash flows will exceed the expected value amount. The Company has estimated the risk adjustment using a confidence level (probability of sufficiency) approach for different lines in the range of 60-75 percentile. That is, the Company has assessed its indifference to uncertainty for product lines (as an indication of the compensation that it requires for bearing non-financial risk) as being equivalent to the 60-75 percentile confidence level less the mean of an estimated probability distribution of the future cash flows.
The Company has estimated the probability distribution of the future cash flows, and the additional amount above the expected present value of future cash flows required to meet the target percentiles.
Classification of investments
Management decides on acquisition of an investment whether it should be classified as of fair value through profit or loss, at fair value through other comprehensive income or at amortised cost.
Valuation of unquoted equity investments
Valuation of unquoted equity investments is normally based on one of the following:
- recent arm’s length market transactions;
- current fair value of another instrument that is substantially the same; and
- the expected cash flows discounted at current rates applicable for items with similar terms and risk characteristics, or other valuation models.
Provision for legal cases
Considerable judgement by management is required in the estimation for legal cases arising from claims made under insurance contracts. Such estimates are necessarily based on significant assumptions about several factors involving varying, and possible significant, degrees of judgement and uncertainty and actual results may differ from management’s estimates resulting in future changes in estimated liabilities.