Consultation on enhancements to APRA’s quarterly insurance publication suite

The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) has today commenced a consultation on proposed enhancements to the content and presentation of its suite of quarterly industry aggregate insurance statistical publications (quarterly insurance publications).

APRA has made significant changes to its capital and reporting framework for insurance with effect from 1 July 2023. These changes reflect the implementation of Australian Accounting Standards Board 17 Insurance Contracts (AASB17), and revisions to the capital framework for private health insurers.

These changes have had an impact on the data presented in the quarterly insurance publications, which are based on now superseded reporting standards. APRA needs to revise the data presented in the impacted quarterly insurance publications to reflect the new reporting framework.

APRA is also taking the opportunity to enhance how it presents data to its stakeholders, moving to a dynamic data visualisation approach featuring data tables and charts. This modernises APRA’s publication approach, which has traditionally focussed on static data tables, facilitating better alignment to stakeholder needs.
Specifically, APRA is seeking feedback on the proposed content and presentation of the:

• Quarterly general insurance performance statistics
• Quarterly life insurance performance statistics; and
• Quarterly private health insurance statistics.

Enhancements to all other insurance publications, including insurance data confidentiality, will form part of a separate consultation later this year.

Content

The implementation of AASB17 and the revised private health insurance (PHI) capital framework has resulted in significant changes in the reporting framework for insurers. Consequently, the content of the existing quarterly insurance publications has been reviewed and updated to reflect the new reporting framework and associated data points.

APRA’s approach has been to ensure that, where possible, the enhanced quarterly insurance publications will provide the same level of data transparency as the existing publication suite. Attachment A provides a complete breakdown of all data points and consolidations that will be included in the respective enhanced quarterly insurance publications.

Due to changes in data points collected under the new reporting framework, attempting to present a history of data points is difficult and potentially misleading.

The reporting framework requires general insurers and life insurers to submit data to APRA on a year-to-date basis for flow items (such as financial performance data) and as-at the reporting date for stock items (such as financial position data). APRA then calculates a discrete quarterly value for flow items that is presented within the general insurance and life insurance publications.

Conversely, the reporting framework requires private health insurers to submit data to APRA on a discrete quarterly basis for flow items and as-at the reporting date for stock items.

The enhanced quarterly insurance publications will therefore have data timeseries starting from the reporting period ending 30 September 2023. The table below summarises the start of the timeseries for stock and flow items across the different industry publications.

Table 1 – Timeseries to be included in the enhanced quarterly insurance publications

APRA will also archive the existing June 2023 quarterly insurance publications, allowing full access to the historical data presented in those editions of the publications.

Private Health Insurance

APRA currently publishes eight quarterly publications for PHI. The structure of the current publication suite for PHI is unique in that the primary quarterly publication includes a mix of financial, capital and membership statistics. This publication is then supported by seven more granular PHI topic-specific publications.

APRA’s proposed approach will be to modify the content of the Quarterly private health insurance statistics publication to only feature financial and capital data¹. This will align the content of the performance publications across the insurance industries. The content of the publication will also be updated to reflect the new reporting and capital framework.

This consultation does not propose any changes to the more granular quarterly publications which will continue to be published quarterly in their current form. Changes to these publications are not expected until the enabling reporting framework is revised and data submitted via APRA Connect. Table 2 summarises the proposed changes to the PHI quarterly publication suite.

Table 2 – Private health insurance quarterly publications

Presentation

APRA is also taking the opportunity to modernise its approach to the presentation of insurance data, leveraging data visualisations to present insurance industry data to its stakeholders.

APRA will be taking an evolutionary approach, translating the existing static data tables into interactive data visualisations that allow for different presentation approaches for different data types and aggregations.

The data visualisations will primarily be interactive tables supported by easy-to-read graphics highlighting trends in key data points. This facilitates a cleaner data presentation approach, collating what would have been multiple data tabs into one interactive report. This allows users to filter on different data consolidations, drilling up and down through the data as required.

This approach also allows data to be presented in different ways to meet the needs of different data users. Visualisations will be prepared at different levels of granularity, moving from dashboards that present key industry metrics, to topic-based reports that present more granular data.

The data visualisations will be updated on a quarterly basis to reflect the latest data submitted by insurers. As the dataset expands over time, the data visualisations will also evolve and improve to provide more insights and analysis. These visualisations will replace the Highlights document that supported the existing quarterly insurance publications.

Examples of the data visualisation approach are included at Attachment B.

Data files

To support the new data visualisation approach, APRA will also be releasing a ‘flat file’ data set that contains all data included in the data visualisation layers. This flat file will be released along-side each quarterly insurance publication. This will allow stakeholders to download the data and utilise data manipulation and presentation methods of their choosing.

Consultation

APRA invites feedback on the proposed content and presentation of the quarterly insurance publications, over a four-week public consultation. Written submissions on the proposals should be sent to dataconsultations@apra.gov.au by 22 May 2024 and addressed to: 

Chief Data Officer
Technology and Data Division
Australian Prudential Regulation Authority.

APRA will then finalise its response to the consultation, and subject to feedback, will release the first edition of the enhanced quarterly publications in June 2024. The first edition will include data for the September 2023, December 2023 and March 2024 reporting periods.

Attachment A – Publication specifications

Attachment B – Example of presentation layer

Footnote

¹Membership and benefits metrics previously included in the Quarterly private health insurance statistics have been transitioned to a stand-alone publication.