Dynamic Financial Analysis: Classification, Conception, and Implementation

Dynamic financial analysis (DFA) models an insurance company’s cash flow in order to forecast assets, liabilities, and ruin probabilities, as well as full balance sheets for different scenarios. In the last years DFA has become an important tool for the analysis of an insurance company’s financial situation. Furthermore it is a valuable instrument for solvency control, which is now becoming quite important as the dynamics of the insurance market increase. The following article considers three aspects: First, we discuss the reasons why DFA is of special importance today. Second, we classify DFA in the context of asset liability management and analyze its fundamental concepts. As a result, we identify several implementation problems that have not yet been adequately considered in the literature, and therefore our third aspect is a discussion of these areas. In particular we consider the generation of random numbers and the modeling of nonlinear dependencies in a DFA framework.