The New Insurance Supervisory Landscape: Implications for Insurance and Pensions

The financial crisis generated significant new regulatory and supervisory architecture to ensure financial stability and enhance consumer welfare. New structures were instituted at the state, provincial, regional, and global levels. While advancing stated primary objectives, these new structures frequently create unintended consequences affecting dimensions of social welfare that lie outside individual supervisory mandates. Unintended effects of new policy and oversight can influence macro-economic growth; availability, quality, and pricing of financial products; returns to capital; and solvency. As a result, new supervisory and regulatory structures can have a variety of ultimate effects on long-term individual financial security, where macro-economic growth, adequate returns to capital, and efficient risk allocation are integral.