The Solvency II Directive 2009/138/EC is an EU Directive that codifies and harmonises the EU insurance regulation. Primarily this concerns the amount of capital that EU insurance companies must hold to reduce the risk of insolvency.
Once the Omnibus II directive is approved by the European Parliament, Solvency II will be scheduled to come into effect on 1 January 2013.
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EU insurance legislation aims to unify a single EU insurance market and enhance consumer protection. The third-generation Insurance Directives established an "EU passport" (single licence) for insurers to operate in all member states if they fulfilled EU conditions. Many member states concluded the EU minima were not enough, and took up their own reforms, which still lead to differing regulations, hampering the goal of a single market.
Since the initial Solvency I Directive 73/239/EEC was introduced in 1973, more elaborate risk management systems developed. Solvency II reflects new risk management practices to define required capital and manage risk. While the "Solvency I" Directive was aimed at revising and updating the current EU Solvency regime, Solvency II has a much wider scope. A solvency capital requirement may have the following purposes:
Often called "Basel for insurers," Solvency II is somewhat similar to the banking regulations of Basel II. For example, the proposed Solvency II framework has three main areas (pillars):
The pillar 1 framework set out qualitative and quantitative requirements for calculation of technical provisions and Solvency Capital Requirement (SCR) using either a standard formula given by the regulators or an internal model developed by the (re)insurance company. Technical provisions comprise two components: the best estimate of the liabilities (i.e. the central actuarial estimate) plus a risk margin. Technical provisions are intended to represent the current amount the (re)insurance company would have to pay for an immediate transfer of its obligations to a third party. The SCR is the capital required to ensure that the (re)insurance company will be able to meet its obligations over the next 12 months with a probability of at least 99.5%. In addition to the SCR capital a Minimum Capital Requirement (MCR) must be calculated which represents the threshold below which the national supervisor (regulator) would intervene. The MCR is intended to correspond to an 85% probability of adequacy over a one year period and is bounded between 25% and 45% of the SCR.
For supervisory purposes, the SCR and MCR can be regarded as "soft" and "hard" floors respectively. That is, a regulatory ladder of intervention applies once the capital holding of the (re)insurance undertaking falls below the SCR, with the intervention becoming progressively more intense as the capital holding approaches the MCR. The Solvency II Directive provides regional supervisors with a number of discretions to address breaches of the MCR, including the withdrawal of authorisation from selling new business and the winding up of the company.