Authored by Zhan Hao (zhanhao@anjielaw.com) and Sharif Hendry (sharifhendry@anjielaw.com) at AnJie Law Firm
As of today, the recently adopted ‘China Risk Oriented Solvency System’, also known as “C-ROSS”, is the only regime by which a Mainland insurer’s capital adequacy is regulated. Following the implementation of China’s 13th Five-Year plan in 2016, the China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC), as the industry’s sole regulator, published an outline of the plan, including several goals relating to the reformation, innovation and regulation of the insurance industry. This draws interesting comparisons with the overseas capital adequacy regimes of other major jurisdictions, notably with Solvency II in the EU. Both these reforms mark a fundamental shift towards a risk-based, market-oriented approach to estimating capital requirements, being geared as they are towards individual insurance entities, rather than the previous "one-model-fits-all" approach. This is expected to lead to greater market efficiency in managing risk, and enhance consumer protection. For China, it marks a renewed focus on both volume and value for the domestic insurance sector, implicitly recognizing that better risk management includes all drivers of product profitability, including product terms and conditions, guarantees, pricing and underwriting . As a result, the transition towards fully implementing, supervising and enforcing the C-ROSS regime is already having far reaching repercussions.