Equity Capital
- 02:00
Understand the equity accounts for a property and casualty insurance company
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Transcript
Understanding the equity of an insurance company is critical when you are modeling because these are regulated organizations and they have to have a minimum amount of capital on their balance sheet. Let's take a look first at a brief example. So in this case we've got a reconciliation between the total shareholders' equity and then the solvency to the regulated measurement. And we can see that we start at the very top with the shareholders' equity. And then there are a series of adjustments. And what the regulators are doing here is they're taking out assets which don't really have any value, particularly if the insurance company gets into trouble. So for example, goodwill, which represents the present value of future profits. If the company's in trouble, those future profits may not be there. So that gets taken out. And there are a number of other items including the foreseeable dividends. And this gives us our unrestricted capital. Now, particularly in Europe, there's some capital items on the balance sheet, which are not equity but from a regulatory point of view, could be treated as tier one. And they tend to be very, very subordinated debt usually with very, very long term repayment if any dates. And that's what is the restricted tier one capital. So your tier one capital here is 1.8 billion. And then there are other subordinated deadlines which are not as secure funding as the restricted tier one capital. And that goes in tier two. And then there's other items in tier three which is defer tax. So that will give us our total own funds number. So to recap, there are certain things that you'll remove from shareholders' equity to get to regulated capital. And the way you can assess how much capital is in the business is comparing the total owned funds divided by the regulatory minimum of capital. And that will give us our solvency capital ratio. Now, that is looking at a company's capital disclosure.