I'll paste an answer I've made before about assets, liabilities and capital. This might help clear some things up for you. It's a question that comes up a lot for some reason, perhaps because people have forgotten all of CT2 by the time they come to do the later exams (it's really just about understanding accounting properly).
Assets, liabilities and capital
Assets are things that you own or that you are owed. Liabilities are things that you owe. Available capital is assets minus liabilities.
Reserves are a liability, representing the amounts owed to policyholders. You don't know for certain what these amounts will be, so this is an estimate. The reason you don't know is because some claims won't have happened yet, some will have happened but haven't been reported yet, and some have been reported but take some time to settle.
Capital is one of the broadest words in finance and economics. Generally, where I've met it, it tends to refer to parts of available capital (defined above).
Required capital refers to the part of available capital that you, or the regulator, think is required to carry out business. Alternatively, you can think of this as the excess assets, over and above liabilities, that are required. Reasons you need to have more assets than liabilities include, but are certainly not limited to:
- deviations of actual vs expected claims payments - i.e. your reserves will be wrong because they were just an estimate of claims
- regulatory (e.g. PRA) or market (e.g. Lloyd's) requirements to hold a certain level of capital
- taking advantage of opportunities as they arise, e.g. writing new business
- dealing with unexpected events, e.g. operational events like COVID require money you don't expected to spend
Often though, required capital will just mean something like the 'SCR' (Solvency Capital Requirement) under Solvency II regulations. An internal (to a company) definition of required capital could differ from this, but in reality tends not to.
Free capital is any available capital that isn't required capital. So it's the assets left over once you take off the liabilities and the required capital. If you have more of this, it means you can get away with taking more risk with it, e.g. investing these assets into high yielding bonds or equities, because even if you lose some of that free capital in the short term you'll have enough assets to meet your liabilities and required capital.
Solvency level can mean different things as well. You can simplistically measure how solvent a company is by comparing how much available capital it has to how much premium it writes, for example by calculating solvency level = (assets - liabilities) / written premium. The idea of this is that if a company writes loads of premium it's taking on a lot of risk, and it shouldn't be doing so if it doesn't have much available capital. Usually though, especially in the UK and Europe, solvency level (aka solvency cover) = available capital / SCR. The idea is the same here - the SCR will be high if the company is running lots of risk, and if they are running a lot of risk compared to their available capital their solvency cover should be low.
If solvency cover (talking about the SCR definition now) is below 100% then it means you don't have enough assets to cover your liabilities plus the SCR, so the regulator (e.g. the PRA) will start to intervene and the company will need to take actions to bring their solvency cover above 100%. A lot of companies will have internal solvency targets of 115%, 125% or 150% and try to maintain this level just to be 'extra secure'. This brings other benefits too like potentially receiving a higher credit rating which is attractive to policyholders and reinsurers.
How are reserves and capital 'used'? (People get confused about this, as they hear people referring to reserves / capital being used up by things, but it doesn't make sense to pay for things with liabilities.)
I'll give an example of assets, liabilities, and capital. Then I'll try to give an example about how we can think about reserves vs capital being 'used'. (The below isn't exactly how things work but hopefully gives a simplified idea to help you understand the terms involved.)
Let's say I raise £10m from investors, who have all bought shares, to start an insurance company. Now I have a balance sheet with £10m of cash on the assets side, £0 of liabilities, and £10m of available capital which we can also think of as money owed to the shareholders.
Now I sell £5m of insurance, which means I get £5m of cash from policyholders (if they all pay up front for their insurance). I estimate I'll end up paying out about £4m of this in claims. Let's say I use £7m cash to buy £7m of bonds to get some return from my money instead of letting it all just sit there as cash. So my balance sheet is now £8m of cash in assets, £7m of bonds, £4m liabilities and £11m of available capital.
The regulator tells me I need to calculate my SCR for all the risks involved in writing that £5m of business and other risks like operational risk and the investment risk associated with the bonds I bought. I do the calculation, which in this instance let's say is a complex formula given to me by the regulator, and the SCR turns out to be £8m. So even though I wrote £5m, my required capital to cover the risks associated with this (and other risks like investment risk) is £8m!
Now the balance sheet is £7m bonds and £8m cash on the assets side, £4m of liabilities (the reserves), and I can split my £11m available capital into £8m of required capital and £3m of free capital.
So, when is capital 'used' versus when are reserves 'used'? Things can get a little theoretical at this point. If a £1m is reported to me, and I think this claim was already included in my estimated "reserve for claims that hadn't been reported", then my liabilities don't change. I was expecting to owe £1m to a policyholder, and now I still expect that. My required capital may or may not change from £8m, depending on the results of the calculation the regulator gave me. Once it's time to pay out this claim, I pay out £1m in cash to the policyholder and this extinguishes the £1m liability I have for that claim in my reserves. So I can think about this claim using my reserves.
If a really bad claim for £3m came in, the type of which I never expected and didn't include in my reserve calculations, then we should probably hold the existing £4m reserve the same as we're still expecting all these claims. What will happen as soon as I know about this £3m claim is I'll add a reserve for it to the existing £4m reserve, so my reserves are now £7m. My required capital may or may not change from £8m, depending on how the results of the formula the regulator gave me change. But in this instance I *could* think about my required capital having served it's purpose - and that I've *used* £3m of the £8m required capital. After all, the reason this required capital is required is to make sure we have enough assets to sustain deviations from what we expected when we estimated the reserves. At the end of the day though, this is all theoretical attribution. What will happen is that I'll pay out the £3m claim from my cash and get rid of the £3m liability I added.
As you can see, when we pay out claims we're just using cash (assets) to pay for them. The balance sheet gives us a way to think about some of our assets as 'backing' our reserves and other liabilities, some as 'backing' our required capital, and the rest as 'free capital'. The reserves and required capital are often just estimates of things though, with some modelling and things done in the background to come up with numbers. You can certainly scratch your head and think about which asset movements (such as paying out a claim) correspond with movements in liabilities, which with movements in required capital, which with movements in free capital, or some combination of the three though.