In this guide we introduce some tips for success to help you master the Business Planning: Insurance exam.
Study advice
As with the other Business Planning exams, the Business Planning: Insurance syllabus includes quite a lot of technical material that may take a while to master.
Different people find different parts of the syllabus easy and hard, so do not expect always to “get it” straight away. If you are not quite getting it, give yourself a break from study and come back later. With the account’s preparation areas of the syllabus, try to understand what the different elements of the figures are actually communicating to investors, eg what does “Contractual Service Margin” mean, as much as how do we calculate it? If you understand what information an investor will get from the information we provide, it makes it much easier for us to understand the process of producing that information and cope with novel scenarios in the exam.
Revision advice
Common pitfalls
It is a good idea to look at the examiners’ comments, which are all available in the “student mark plans” after each examination session on the ICAEW website. These give future exam candidates the chance to learn from what their predecessors did not do so well. Common themes that the examiners flag as areas for improvement are:
- Preparing numbers, but not appearing to understand what they mean. This is especially true in IFRS 17 preparation questions.
- Not using the facts of the scenario, eg listing the generic advantages of equities or government debts, but not relating those comments to the specific needs of the company in the exam question.
- Over-reacting to apparent breaches of regulation, rather than dealing with them in a realistic and proportionate way.