• We are pleased to announce that the winner of our Feedback Prize Draw for the Winter 2024-25 session and winning £150 of gift vouchers is Zhao Liang Tay. Congratulations to Zhao Liang. If you fancy winning £150 worth of gift vouchers (from a major UK store) for the Summer 2025 exam sitting for just a few minutes of your time throughout the session, please see our website at https://www.acted.co.uk/further-info.html?pat=feedback#feedback-prize for more information on how you can make sure your name is included in the draw at the end of the session.
  • Please be advised that the SP1, SP5 and SP7 X1 deadline is the 14th July and not the 17th June as first stated. Please accept out apologies for any confusion caused.

April 2010

M

M1ke

Member
So how did everyone find this paper?

I found Q1 the hardest given that to answer it properly you would have had to have done a lot of reading around Solvency 2.

I would be interested to know how others got on and how this compares to their previous attempts.

Cheers
 
Overall not too bad. It could have been worse. On Q1 I found it difficult to come up with the points, and couldn't really seperate out the Solvency 2 points from the planning points. This was especially true for the last 3 parts of Q1. How many points do they need for a 10-mark q on how to improve treatment of historic reserve changes in the planning process? I targeted 20 seperate points, but was struggling to make 7 or 8 good ones.

As well I'm not sure how much of Q1 was specific Solvency 2 knowledge, and how much is just common sense. EG I know that using the same estimate of claim inflation in each years planning process cannot be right, but I don't know the specific Solvency 2-related reason that makes it wrong.

Second question on portfolio transfers was straightforward bookwork, I thought. Just go through every option and list the advantages & disadvantages.
 
Yep I agree completely.

I also found it very difficult to generate enough points for the last parts of Q1. For the main part I settled on just saying what was wrong with the planning process they were using and decided if I don't know what Solvency 2 says about it I won't try to be clever. I wondered if having a target return on capital for the whole business was against Solvency 2 because they should have allocated capital to each LOB and then had a target return for each. But I didn't say that in my answer.

Q2 must be one of the easiest SA3 questiosn I've seen as long as you know your exit strategies.
 
Overall I thought this paper at least appeared to be more straightforward than the previous sitting but as always it's difficult to know exactly what the examiners are looking for - this wouldn't be the first time I've been caught out!

Q1 was very similar to Q1 from Apr-01 (paper 2), without the Solvency II slant of course. However, I still struggled to generate lots of targeted points for the last three parts of this question.

Q2 seemed fairly straightforward apart from part (iii). I didn't find it that easier to explain pros/cons of each exit strategy for the classes of business given in the question.

Oh well, just have to wait and see...
 
Back
Top