Definition:Insurance service result
| Insurance service result | |
|---|---|
| Category | kpis; pnl |
| Metric id | insurance_service_result |
| Unit | currency |
| Related terms | Insurance revenue, Insurance service expense, Net investment income |
| Definition | Insurance revenue less insurance service expenses, plus the net reinsurance result: the IFRS 17 underwriting result. |
đ Insurance service result is the IFRS 17 measure of profit from insurance operations: insurance revenue less insurance service expenses, plus the net income or expense from reinsurance contracts held. It is the standard's answer to the underwriting result: the profit an insurer makes from taking and servicing risk, presented separately from what the insurer earns on invested assets.
âď¸ The separation is the defining design choice. IFRS 17 splits an insurer's performance into two pillars. The insurance service result captures margins released from in-force business, claims and expense experience, and losses on onerous contracts. A finance pillar carries investment returns and the unwinding of discounting on insurance liabilities. Reinsurance held nets into the service result, so the line reflects performance after the cost and recoveries of protection purchased. Groups disclose the result by segment, expressed in currency, and typically decompose it into the release of the contractual service margin, the release of the risk adjustment, experience variances, and onerous-contract effects.
đ Before IFRS 17, analysts inferred underwriting profitability through framework-specific constructs: combined ratios in property-casualty, margin analyses in life. Those constructs compared poorly across business lines and jurisdictions. A single service result gives analysts one underwriting-profit line that works across life, health, and property-casualty alike, and IFRS 17 adopters across Europe and Asia have quickly made it a headline KPI in results communication. Read alongside the investment side of the income statement, the result shows whether a group's earnings come from disciplined risk-taking or from asset returns.