This is a long awaited and much anticipated publication due to:
- the ORSA being a new concept introduced in the Solvency II Level 1 Directive (Article 45 and 246(4)) and a real need to understand the regulatory expectations;
- there was very little detail provided in Article 45 and 246(4) and no Delegated Acts have been requested on the ORSA; and
- there has not been a formal public consultation to date on the ORSA (as since the Level 1 Directive we have just seen an Issue Paper published in May 2008 and an informal paper in December 2010 which was only shared with major European stakeholders).
Feedback from the previous documents has been taken into account by EIOPA in order to provide a Consultation Paper (CP11/008) to facilitate the preparatory work of (re)insurance undertakings for this area of Solvency II. This public consultation is being organised before the agreement on the Omnibus II Directive. However, we do not expect any changes to Article 45 as a result of this as no Delegated Acts on the ORSA have been requested by the European Commission. CP11/008 as published, is not going to be directly influenced by either of these steps in the Solvency II process.
EIOPA is looking for stakeholders’ feedback on any aspects of the paper and in particular on the specific questions that have been summarised in Annex II of the paper. EIOPA state that comments are most useful if they respond to the questions, contain a clear rationale and describe alternative proposals that EIOPA should consider.
