Meet Francesco Nagari

Francesco Nagari is a partner in Deloitte LLP based in London where he has joined from PricewaterhouseCoopers to take the position of Global IFRS Insurance Leader from October 2008. In that capacity he is a member of the London IFRS Centre of Excellence of Deloitte. He qualified in Italy as dottore commercialista (1991) and revisore contabile (1995) and a chartered accountant in the UK with the ICAEW (2011). He speaks Italian, English, French and Portuguese.

Francesco is known as a professional who combines extensive IFRS expertise in the field of insurance accounting and capital regulation with international industry knowledge and practical experience on the other issues that affect insurers’ financial and solvency reporting.

He has 20 years of insurance accounting and business experience with a deep knowledge of some of the key European insurance markets, capital regulations and products. He led several audit and advisory projects with multinational insurance companies in Milan and London. Between November 2009 and January 2011 he acted as the Director of Group Finance for Prudential plc assisting Tidjane Thiam and Nic Nicandrou, group CEO and CFO, with the financial reporting and listing aspects associated with the attempted acquisition of AIA and the successful listing of Prudential shares in Hong Kong and Singapore as well as all of the Prudential group financial, management and tax reporting matters. In that interim management role he was part of Prudential project team for the implementation of Solvency II, led the group-wide impact study to assess the implications for Prudential arising from the IFRS 4 Phase II exposure draft and launched the implementation of a new group consolidation system. He remains a key advisor to Prudential and his executive team across a range of issues.

For the last ten years Francesco has concentrated his work on advising most of the large insurance and banking groups in the world to develop solutions for their IFRS issues around insurance reporting. Clients which he advised included AXA, Generali, Prudential plc, Aegon, MetLife, AIG, ACE, Tokio Marine, Standard Life, China Pacific, China Life, ZFS, Swiss Re, Swiss Life, Legal and General, Sun Life of Canada among the insurers and Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, Fortis, Credit Agricole, BNP Paribas, Intesa San Paolo among the bankers.

Over the same period he has been heavily involved in developing the global IFRS expertise of his firm for the insurance sector where he was a key contributor to the firm’s responses to all IFRS exposure drafts that impacted insurance accounting as well as the responses to other documents related to insurance accounting (e.g. the exposure drafts issued by the International Actuarial Association). He regularly discusses with the board members of the IASB and their technical staff the status of insurance reporting and the directions that the IASB intends to take in its insurance project.

In November 2008 he was appointed to the Insurance Accounting Working Group of the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG) which supports EFRAG formulating its IFRS endorsement advice to the European Commission and influences the development of IFRSs and its interpretations on insurance specific matters within the EU. Over time he has also served as a member of various working parties established at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales (ICAEW), the UK Board of Actuarial Standards and the Italian Assirevi (Association of Audit Firms). In June 2011 he has been appointed to be one of the founding members and the representative of the accounting profession at the Financial Reporting Group set by the UK Actuarial Profession.

During 2009 he has been an active member of the Deloitte European Solvency II working group responsible to develop the firm’s position on the proposed detailed regulations that will implement the new regime in 2012. He has been one of the project leaders of the Deloitte team that worked for the European Commission to assess the impact assessment of these detailed regulations on the European insurance market focussing particularly on the estimate of the Pillar 3 administrative burden on the EU market. The result of this work inputs directly into the political decision making process that will give final shape to the new capital regime for European insurers.

Francesco is the author of several articles and publications on the subject of financial and solvency reporting in the insurance sector and regularly speaks at conferences on IFRS insurance reporting and the interaction of IFRS with the future solvency regime. He wrote the IFRS illustrative financial statements for insurers (2004 and 2006 editions) which represented the first document of its kind in the world. During 2007 he dedicated a substantial amount of his time to research insurance investors’ views on insurance reporting. In March 2009 he launched a monthly newsletter distributed to Deloitte clients worldwide where he comments on the developments of the IASB/FASB joint project to produce the new IFRS and US GAAP for insurance contracts which has been paired with a monthly webcast since July 2009 regularly attended by hundreds of subscribers worldwide. He is the author of the chapter of the “The Solvency II Handbook” (Risk Publications, November 2009) on IFRS/Solvency II similarities and differences.