This insight interview, was conducted in advance of the Insurance Asset Management Summit to be held on the 15th November in London with Laura Worboyes, Head of Investment Operations at MS Amlin. Laura is also Director, Chief Finance & Risk Officer for MS Amlin Investment Management.

Please describe your daily role and key responsibilities?

I’m responsible for the management and strategic direction of investment operations for the group. I lead the operations team to ensure policies and processes meet regulatory, risk management, and audit requirements and I oversee the day-to-day investment operations. This covers budgeting & expense management, risk management, market information and regulatory reporting, systems and data management, treasury, relationship management, legal & compliance and business continuity planning.

As part of my role I’m also Chief Risk Officer and Chief Finance Officer for MS Amlin’s Investment Management Company. In this role my key responsibilities are the operating model, oversight of outsourced activity, enterprise risk management, financial matters, capital adequacy, regulatory submissions and business planning.

Is the sense that with the introduction of GDPR and the seeming bedding down of Solvency II requirements, specific to insurers, we’re faced with a relative regulatory lull and allowing insurers to focus once again on individual development projects?

The pace of regulatory change seems to have slowed, however, we do still have a steady stream of changes to consider as an asset manager for insurance businesses, such as Senior Managers Certification Regime (SMCR), European Markets Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), EU Benchmarks Regulation, European Money Market Funds Regulation and of course, the impact Brexit wil have on our business and specifically operatons.

Where have the pressures on investment operations within insurers become particularly acute and why?

Data management and the ability to transform quality data into analysis and reporting for regulatory submissions and effective governance is critical. With the volume of data required to support this increasing and the regulatory requirements around how it’s managed, the pressure is on for flexible and robust solutions.

Has the role of outsourcing increased for you in the face of growing demands on your time and in what parts of the business has outsourcing been most beneficial?

Outsourcing has increased with benefits in two key areas, one is in leveraging the skills and expertise of a third party provider where we don’t have the experience in house, and the second is where we can take advantage of a providers large scale teams and increased level of infrastructure investment reducing key person risk, benefitting from economies of scale and accessing latest technology advancements.

How is the Senior Managers and Certification Regime impacting your comfort with offloading critical tasks to third-parties?

With outsourcing comes a shift in the required skills set of the internal team. The oversight role that the internal team now needs to perform is critical to supporting the requirements of the SMCR. As long as the appropriate level of first line management is in place and the second and third lines of defence are used appropriately and in a collaborative way a good level of comfort can be achieved. We ensure our risk management and compliance monitoring is as focused on outsourced activity as it is on in house activity and our internal audit also visit our outsourced providers where it’s deemed necessary.

Registration to the Insurance Asset Management Summit on the 15th November at 200 Aldersgate, London, is open and available to register by clicking here. Only representatives of insurers and regulatory bodies are able to register for free. Should you not be an insurer but wish to be part of this event, then get in touch with Noel Hillmann at noelhillmann@clearpathanalysis.com or call +44 (0) 207 688 8511