Book Description

This book bridges the gap between the accounting and the actuarial sides of Indian life insurance companies, by exploring the relationships between the embedded value calculated by actuaries and the revenue account and balance sheet prepared by the accountants. The author provides publicly available sources of information to place a value on the shares of Indian life insurance companies from an outsider’s point of view. Life insurance company accounts are complex and require knowledge of specific concepts in order to analyze and appreciate them. This book will help a layperson with reasonable numerical abilities understand the calculation of the share price of a life insurance company. In particular, it will help analysts and accountants with no actuarial background understand the concepts of embedded and appraisal value. Cash flow statements of these companies are often ignored and delegated to the background or usually to a single page in their annual reports. This book examines the cash flows in detail and rearranges them to get a better picture of the financial health of the underlying companies. It also explains the relationship between the different measures of profit such as cash reserves, surplus, profit after tax, and embedded value. Often this information is only available internally or to consultants. The author uses alternative approaches based purely on public disclosures by these companies, thereby enabling professionals without access to internal information to come to informed judgments about the actual performance of the companies.