A growing framework of legal and ethical requirements limit scientific and commercial evaluation of personal data. Typically, pseudonymization, encryption, or methods of distributed computing try to protect individual privacy. However, computational infrastructures still depend on human system administrators. This introduces severe security risks and has strong impact on privacy: system administrators have unlimited access to the computers that they manage including encryption keys and pseudonymization-tables. Distributed computing and data obfuscation technologies reduce but do not eliminate the risk of privacy leakage by administrators. They produce higher implementation effort and possible data quality degradation. This paper proposes the Trusted Server as an alternative approach that provides a sealed and inaccessible computational environment in a cryptographically strict sense. During operation or by direct physical access to storage media, data stored and processed inside the Trusted Server can by no means be read, manipulated or leaked, other than by brute-force. Thus, secure and privacy-compliant data processing or evaluation of plain person-related data becomes possible even from multiple sources, which want their data kept mutually secret.
This article is reasoning why risk and capital management in insurance companies malfunctioned partially during the recent capital market crises and what measures insurers and regulators have to adopt to ameliorate thoroughly their control and steering systems. Comparisons to finance and banking are made throughout the article, because they are Instructive and rich in contrast.
This article takes a global view of risk-based capital management in the insurance business, which nowadays is a key issue of the management of insurance companies. A thorough analysis of recent regulatory authorities' and rating agencies' positions shows that it is also a core topic in discussions about future financial frameworks in general. As a matter of fact, many parties are involved in the development of these frameworks, so there is an urgent need for common principles. This article identifies the essentials of future financial frameworks, highlights aspects which should be affected by a unified economic view, and outlines what progress has already been made.
Insurance and reinsurance companies provide their services and risk taking capacity not only in their home markets, but also in other territories and jurisdictions. Sophisticated supervisory approaches must exist to protect the policy-holders adequately in such a complex environment. It is thus not beneficial for supervisors, insurers and reinsurers as well as policy-holders if each territory establishes its own supervisory regime. Only a global supervisory approach can cope with the comprehensive requirements and would ensure that resources of all stakeholders are appropriately allocated. The paper compares the supervisory regimes in Europe and the Unites States, that is in the two main insurance markets. The analyses reveal that the future European standard Solvency II exhibits many features that would also be required for a potential future global solvency standard.
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