Tax services for the Insurance industry 

This is particularly important with the prospect of Solvency 2 and IFRS Phase 2 requiring insurers to revise fundamentally how they manage and measure their businesses.

These changes on the horizon are prompting insurance groups to look at the way that they organize their businesses as they try to reduce their capital regulatory requirements while maintaining or improving their commercial and fiscal efficiency. This has highlighted several key areas:

• Establishing pan-European insurance carriers.
• The challenges of restructuring legacy group structures to take advantage of the new opportunities.
• Transfer pricing, both on cross border services and on intra-group reinsurance.
• VAT and the future of the insurance exemption, particularly where business activities have to be disaggregated.
• Insurance Premium Taxes and other para-fiscal charges where insurers offer products to cover multi-national risks for their major customers.
• The implementation of IT and technology solutions to streamline the financial and tax reporting processes.
• The use of captive insurers both by insurance groups and by multinational industrial groups to pool and manage their risks.

Discussions with our member firms' clients and our own experience in the insurance industry have convinced us that each insurance group is going to have a different take on all these issues depending on several factors, including their own geographical spread, their sources of capital and their growth ambitions. This is why insurance tax professionals in KPMG members firms work in the major and emerging insurance markets around the world and provide tax advice that aims to reflect this breadth of experience.