Guidance tutorial

  The COVID 19 pandemic and the resulting lockdowns have had a devastating impact on most industries and financial markets.  The IMF has predicted a severe downturn for FY 20, much worse than the 2008 financial crisis. The existing rock-bottom asset valuations, bond yields, and so on, have and would continue to impact the profitability of insurance companies. IFRS 9 (financial instruments) and IFRS 17 (insurance contracts) were issued to create transparency in the financial statements of companies that would adopt them.  Most insurance companies are working towards implementing these accounting standards to become compliant effective January 1, 2023. It would be interesting to ponder over the impact on measurement of various investment and insurance portfolios according to IFRS 9 and IFRS 17, if a similar downturn were to take place post 2023. The IFRS 9 standard will govern the accounting and reporting of insurance investment portfolios, a majority of which will get meas...

Consulting company Accenture is cutting as many as 25,000 jobs worldwide. Accenture Layoffs would impact employees that are in a bottom 5% bucket based on Performance Appraisal.  Accenture India also will Layoff several thousands of employees. Accenture has about 492,000 employees around the world.  CEO Julie Sweet responded to a question about job losses. “As I have said this before, we have identified some real areas of efficiencies, and so that has obviously headcount implications to it, which may be what you’re calling layoffs,” she said. Accenture Layoff was in the news when the company cut 900 jobs in the U.K. resulting from Business slowdown amid the coronavirus pandemic. According to Guardian which obtain a memo, “Accenture went into the crisis with an overcapacity of people relative to demand; The crisis has caused additional strain on the business due to lower demand and reduced national attrition.” The  Australian Financial Review sources  report...

This is the second Google core update of 2020. Barry Schwartz on May 4, 2020 at 2:30 pm Google announced it is rolling out a new core update, the May 2020 core update, Monday. This is the second core update of the 2020 year, the first one was the January 2020 core update. Historically, Google has released a core Google algorithm update every few months or so. It was just a bit over 3-months ago since the January core update. The announcement.  Google said “Later today, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the May 2020 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before.” Later today, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the May 2020 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see this blog post for more about that:https://t.co/e5ZQUAlt0G — Google Search Liaison (@searchliais...

  The global payments landscape has been navigating through difficult times and the challenges have been compounded by drastic uncertainties unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic.  With increased focus on digital payment platforms, financial services firms must plan their responses carefully and effectively manage the outcomes in the post-pandemic era to be able to deliver seamless services in the payments space. Clearly, as the new world order emerges, the swiftest response would be to further digitalize monetary transactions, which means deeper adoption of digital technologies in the payments space, underpinned by continuous intelligence. Aiming for Fully-Realized Digital Payments From the consumer perspective, financial transactions have seen an upward swing with significant growth of domestic and cross-border e-commerce.  With the spend traffic shifting more toward remote and digital payments, the increased adoption of digital payments paves the way for further innovatio...

  The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a huge toll on people and economies alike. Governments and central banks worldwide have introduced a slew of fiscal measures to infuse liquidity and stability in the market.  However, in spite of these measures, the financial markets are expected to remain highly volatile for a significant duration, likely to worsen further due to lowering of interest rates and increasing credit spread gaps as well as risk of mortgage defaults.  Insurers therefore need to assess the impact on their solvency margins and IRRs, and re-assess the assumptions around mortality and morbidity rates, operational and financial costs, claims and losses, and so on.   Actuaries must review existing strategies and products and construct new ones to handle evolving risks and their interactions to be able to better model assets and liabilities as well as analyze asset and capital adequacies.  Moreover, insurers will have to perform strong scenario testing ...

  Nonmetallic solutions can benefit the global energy industry, diversifying business streams and promoting sustainability Sectors impacted include: building and construction; automotive; packaging; renewables; oil and gas Aramco established the Non-metallic Innovation Centre to promote global use of nonmetallic materials and to advance related technologies Pipelines are built to be safe, but corrosion is a natural consequence of metal use, and must be monitored and managed. Called “the invisible enemy” for a reason, corrosion costs industries around the world billions of dollars each year in prevention, maintenance, and repair expenses. Some sources put corrosion costs for the oil and gas industry alone at more than $60 billion. Fighting the gradual return of metal to its natural state is especially important for our sector, as component failure can mean not just costly interruption of business, but environmental consequences. The decision to develop a suite of advanced polymeric ...

  Over the past decade, technology has played a pioneering role in driving biopharmaceutical innovation and created significant disruption in the regulatory environment.  The regulatory aspects of Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Control (CMC) are evolving rapidly with advancements such as analytics, automation, robotics, and blockchain, becoming mainstream in strategic and operational functions. Automated Regulatory Equals Scrutinized Compliance One of the many revolutionizing technologies – intelligent automation – has now become an inseparable part of several business functions.  From lowering costs to simplifying data gathering between different systems, automation presents numerous opportunities to enhance quality and efficiency. Technologies in artificial intelligence (AI) such as machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) take over manual, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks to achieve self-evolving, automated systems with rapid outcomes.  Let u...