Overview

The Grant Thornton International IFRS team has published Get ready for IFRS 17: A fundamental change to the reporting for insurance contracts. IFRS 17 Insurance contracts rewrites the rulebook for insurance reporting and will transform data, people, technology solutions and investor relations.


IFRS 17 is effective for annual accounting periods starting on or after January 1, 2021. It supersedes IFRS 4 Insurance contracts as revised in 2016 and marks the conclusion of the IASB’s twenty-year long insurance project.


IFRS 4 was designed to be an interim standard and therefore allowed entities issuing insurance contracts to carry on accounting for them using policies that had been developed under their previous local accounting standards. This meant that companies continued to use a multitude of  different approaches for accounting for insurance contracts, making it difficult to compare and contrasts the financial performance of otherwise similar companies. IFRS 17 solves the comparison problems created by IFRS 4 by requiring all insurance contracts to be accounted for in a consistent manner.