Successful completion of 9-month Solvency 2 assignment with top European insurer
SwissThink successfully finalized a 9-month consulting assignment with a top European insurer. Its Risk Management function required support in developing a stress-testing approach to substantiate the resilience of unrated, mostly infrastructure assets, under the Solvency II framework. In a 2016 report, McKinsey estimated that $2.5 trillion was being invested annually in infrastructure, but that to keep pace with global demand going forward annual investments would need to increase to $3.3 trillion until 2030, requiring massive long-term investment outlays.
Like many other insurers across the world over the past decade, our client has made significant investments in infrastructure projects. The asset class matches their appetite for long term maturities and their investment commitment to a greener and socially responsible future.
Our client sought support to supply the supervisory authority with additional comfort about the credit strength of multiple asset classes, including solar, housing, ports and rail projects, amongst others. Thanks to its unique combination of expertise in infrastructure finance and insurance ratings, SwissThink is helping the credit risk management department to achieve this goal. Our client has successfully completed a prototype phase and is progressing further as part of its quest to achieve supervisory approval.
Suzanne Smith (project lead) and Nicole Martin leveraged their extensive experience spanning decades as senior IFR analysts at S&P Global Ratings to identify key stress factors on the project finance assets. Lotfi Elbarhdadi, an Actuary, former EY consultant and former S&P Global Ratings senior insurance analyst, provided an effective bridge between the insurance capital measurement and credit risk frameworks. The SwissThink team also arranged meetings with former senior S&P colleagues to help our client read more into the intricacies of rating agency methodology.
We believe strongly that the skillset mix we offer to clients is unique, and our input provides a reliable and independent view, grounded on the strong knowledge of various credit ratings methodologies and decades of consultancy and credit analysis experience.