Solvency II has finally arrived. From January 1, 2016, the focus has changed from the "best efforts" approach acceptable in the preparatory phase to ensuring full compliance with all the detailed requirements of Solvency II. This new reality has placed much more onerous requirements on insurance companies across their business activities, ranging from reserve calculations to governance frameworks to reporting requirements.

This means companies are faced with a need to demonstrate compliance with the full detail and complexity of Solvency II. The Directive, Delegated Acts, and Level Three Guidelines alone cover 2,390 pages. To show compliance, you need to assimilate this vast amount of information and collect evidence from a wide range of experts and department heads in your company.

We have used our Solvency II expertise to develop an intuitive and flexible tool to help companies assess how compliant they are with the Solvency II requirements. This builds on our experience of developing our Milliman Solvency II Readiness Assessment Tool over the last few years. In developing this tool, we have partnered with ViClarity, a compliance software company, to ensure that users will get the benefit of Milliman's knowledge and will also get the functionality and platform that would be expected of a market-leading compliance tool.

The Milliman Solvency II Compliance Assessment Tool distills the Solvency II requirements into easily digestible self-assessment questions. Assessing compliance across an entire organisation requires collaboration across all business operations and departments. The Milliman Solvency II Compliance Assessment Tool is based in an easy-to-use cloud-based platform, facilitating the gathering of all necessary information across the whole organization.

This enables both life and nonlife insurance and reinsurance companies to easily monitor and assess their levels of compliance across all three Pillars of Solvency II, while simultaneously creating an audit trail of work done and a development plan for future actions and ongoing review.