In the course of creating a single European market for financial services and in the wake of two financial crises, regulatory frameworks in the financial services industry in the European Union have undergone significant change. One of the major reforms has been the transition from static rules-based systems towards principles-based regulation with the intent to better capture the risk situation of an undertaking. For insurance companies, the regulatory framework Solvency II is being finalised and is scheduled for implementation after 2013. At the same time, the regulatory regime for banking, Basel II, has been revised in response to the financial crisis; the new version is Basel III. The aim of this paper is to conduct a comprehensive and structured comparative assessment of Basel II/III and Solvency II in order to detect similarities and differences as well as the benefits and drawbacks of both regimes, which might be profitably addressed. The comparison is conducted against the background of the industries’ characteristics and the objectives of regulation.

In this paper we prove that partial-moments-based performance measures (e.g., Omega, Kappa, upside-potential ratio, Sortino-Satchell ratio, Farinelli-Tibiletti ratio), value-at-risk-based performance measures (e.g., VaR ratio, CVaR ratio, Rachev ratio, generalized Rachev ratio), and other admissible performance measures are a strictly increasing function in the Sharpe ratio. The theoretical basis of this result is the location and scale property and two other plausible and mild conditions. Our result provides a decision-theoretic foundation for all these frequently used performance measures. Moreover, it might explain the empirical finding that all these measures typically lead to very similar rankings.

In addition to an interest rate guarantee and annual surplus participation, life insurance contracts typically embed the right to stop premium payments during the term of the contract (paid-up option), to resume payments later (resumption option), or to terminate the contract early (surrender option). Terminal guarantees are on benefits payable upon death, survival and surrender. The latter are adapted after exercising the options. A model framework including these features and an algorithm to jointly value the premium payment and surrender options is presented. In a first step, the standard principles of risk-neutral evaluation are applied and the policyholder is assumed to use an economically rational exercise strategy. In a second step, option value sensitivity on different contract parameters, benefit adaptation mechanisms, and exercise behavior is analyzed numerically. The two latter are the main drivers for the option value.

Due to substantial changes in competition, capital market conditions, and supervisory frameworks, holistic analysis of an insurance company’s assets and liabilities takes on special relevance. An important tool in this context is dynamic financial analysis (DFA). DFA is a systematic approach to financial modeling in which financial figures are projected under a variety of possible scenarios by showing how outcomes are affected by changing internal and/or external factors. The discussion in Europe about new risk-based capital standards (Solvency II project) and the development of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), as well as expanding catastrophe claims, have made DFA an useful tool for cash flow projection and decision making, especially in the non-life and reinsurance businesses (for an overview, see [2]).

In this paper we present a family of iterative methods to solve numerically second order elliptic problems with multi-scale data using multiple levels of grids. These methods are based upon the introduction of a Lagrange multiplier to enforce the continuity of the solution and its fluxes across interfaces. This family of methods can be interpreted as a mortar element method with complete overlapping domain decomposition for solving numerically multi-scale elliptic problems.