(Bloomberg) -- Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission is taking steps to reduce the burden of life insurers’ foreign-exchange hedging costs, which have risen because of the wide gap between local and US interest rates.
The island’s insurers will be allowed to apply to increase FX volatility reserves from other reserve pools, the FSC’s Insurance Bureau Deputy Director General Tsai Huo-yen said at a briefing Thursday in Taipei.
The changes will effectively boost insurers’ forex hedging reserves to as much as NT$960 billion ($30.1 billion), from the current level of as much as NT$300 billion, according to Tsai. This will reduce their need for hedging tools like currency swaps and non-deliverable forwards, lowering hedging costs.
New rules will also double the so-called extra deposit and offset rate for the forex gains and losses of insurers’ unhedged assets and liabilities to 100%.
The Taiwan dollar has declined roughly 4% this year against the greenback, with the local benchmark interest rate of 2% less than half of the 5.25% to 5.5% range in the US. The industry spent more than NT$360 billion hedging against foreign exchange fluctuations in 2023, according to FSC data.
Taiwan first introduced the reserves mechanism in 2012, allowing insurers to deposit part of their forex gains to the pool and tap the funds to hedge against losses, in a way to smooth out their profits. It revised the rules in 2019 and again in 2023 to increase the flexibility of forex risk management.
The total pool of reserves across life insurers increased 66% to NT$231 billion from the start of this year through July, according to official data. While life insurers reaped forex gains of NT$923.7 billion so far this year thanks to a weaker Taiwan dollar, hedging tool losses and costs totaled NT$894.2 billion.
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There had been market talk of a possible regulatory change.
“The need to replenish FX valuation reserves continues to be a drag on Taiwan lifers’ operating income and is weighing down on overall pretax profit,” Bank of America analyst Chun Him Cheung said in a May report on talks between life insurers and the FSC.
--With assistance from Cindy Wang and Chien-Hua Wan.
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