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2/17/2011
Supervising Internationally Active Insurance Groups

We have been following with interest the development of Solvency II, and I will just say that we in the U.S. understand the challenges of developing a uniform risk-based capital system. Major regulatory change typically comes with differences in opinion between supervisors and the industry they supervise. So it is not surprising that Europe is working through a number of difficult issues as they near the adoption of Solvency II. In fact, the rhetoric sounds quite familiar to me, not unlike things we hear when we try to make changes in the U.S. But, in my experience, these differences generally get resolved, and we hope you have the same success with your discussions around Solvency II. We must all acknowledge that there is no perfect regulatory system out there, be it Solvency II or our U.S. system. If there is anything that the recent financial crisis taught us, it is that regulatory systems fail, and regulators are fallible. We should be appropriately humble about our ability to supervise a very dynamic, very complex marketplace, and we can all learn from each other.