Ias/ifrs and insurance: a gradual shifting from insurane to finance

Financial year 2005 marks the gradual introduction of the international accounting standard (IAS) as part of a broad project promoted by the EU to achieve consistency and comparability and, consequently, greater transparency in corporate accounts, with benefits for the users and institutions who make use of, or exercise control over them. The present paper will not address all the related complex profiles (e.g., actuarial methodologies, financial evaluation models, cash-flows scenarios generation techniques). Actual aim is to bring evidence for the gradual shifting of perspective promoted by the financial community as far as the insurance companies are concerned: Once considered as unknown “black-boxes” because of their peculiarities, western countries’ most authoritative agencies and largest private investors felt for a long time uneasy to manage insurance companies’ disclosures. More recently, since the industry has been absorbed in the world-wide trend toward global conglomerate encompassing banking, finance and insurance, western regulators have undertaken a sound effort to move insurance disclosures from a technical to a financial view, boosting a dramatic homologation to other financial institutions (Cesarini & Varaldo, 1992; Forestieri & Moro, 1993; Locatelli, et al., 1999). The trade-off, the authors intend to show, is now between more transparent outlook and an insider’s knowledge of an industry whose peculiarities are inescapable. Key words: insurance companies; insurance risk; IAS/IFRS; EU-market; actuarial rules; property-and-casualty; life-and-health; banking; finance