IFRS 17 Insurance Contracts is effective for annual reporting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2023.  Accordingly, many companies will reflect the application of IFRS 17 in their annual financial statements for the first time in 2023.  The standard is not limited to insurance companies; many non-insurers may also find that they have insurance contracts within the scope of the standard.  Deloitte's A Closer Look publication provides guidance on aspects of IFRS 17 that such companies should consider when they assess whether contracts they issue are within the scope of IFRS 17.  

When preparing their year-end disclosures, companies should consider the findings and better practice examples included in the Financial Reporting Council's (FRC's) IFRS 17 thematic review.  This contains the FRC's expectations for year-end reporting, where it expects companies to:

• Provide quantitative and qualitative disclosures, which are both decision-useful and company-specific, which meet the disclosure objective of IFRS 17 and enable users to understand how insurance contracts are measured and presented in the financial statements.
• Ensure that accounting policies are sufficiently granular and provide clear, consistent explanations of accounting policy choices, key judgements and methodologies, particularly where IFRS 17 is not prescriptive.
• Where sources of estimation uncertainty exist, provide information about the underlying methodology and assumptions made to determine the specific amount at risk of material adjustment and provide meaningful sensitivities and/or ranges of reasonably possible outcomes.
• Provide sufficiently disaggregated qualitative and quantitative information to allow users to understand the financial effects of material portfolios of insurance (and reinsurance) contracts.
• Clearly explain the impact of transition to IFRS 17, including details of underlying methodology to measure insurance contracts at the measurement date and disclosure of reconciliations of the contractual service margin (CSM) and revenue by transition method.
• Ensure alternative performance measures, and any changes to such measures, are adequately explained, not given undue prominence and reconciled to the most directly reconcilable line item in the financial statements.

This page includes a collection of all of our resources on IFRS 17.  It includes links to:

• all of our news items related to IFRS 17;
• our major publications on IFRS 17; and
• Insurance webcasts.