Acies wins the 2021 Asia Risk ‘Risk Management Consultant of the Year’ award

Acies was awarded the ‘Risk Management Consultant of the Year’ for its work with more than 15 Indian insurance companies and global banks on interest rate risk management. The Asia Risk Awards 2021 virtual ceremony of Acies’ award was held on 27 September 2021.

As demand for savings and annuity products increased significantly amid falling interest rates during the pandemic, Acies, headquartered in India’s financial hub of Mumbai, acted swiftly in helping its insurance clients manage interest rate risk. It achieved this with an extensive suite of strategies, processes and technology.

“We worked with some large banks with an intention of coming up with an industry solution that would allow insurers to de-risk the interest rate guarantee they give to the end-users” says Muzammil Patel, Managing Director at Acies.

Acies also engaged with banking and insurance regulators to address concerns, modify product structures and enable a standardized roll-out to the industry to ensure responsible and sustainable growth of the forward rate agreement (FRA) product. Acies’ work brought about transparency and standardization in FRA pricing and valuation.

For insurance clients, Acies provides end-to-end consulting services – including setting up risk management and accounting frameworks, and a derivatives system. The derivatives system, Kore considers transaction entries, daily mark-to-market updates, daily margining and, subsequently, ledger entries to be passed onto the accounting system. Finally, Acies’ solutions also help generate risk measures that must be submitted to regulators.

“We want to make sure the insurers are working on a fully-hedged basis; that they are accounting for derivatives correctly and they can prove to the regulators they have the requisite offsets and risk capital” says Muzammil Patel. “When that happens, it gives them more latitude to de-risk the entire spectrum.”

To know more about this award, click here