We closed our first reporting period under IFRS 17 last month. The actuarial side went better than feared. What I did not budget for was the board conversation: CSM is a genuinely new language and a four-page paper was never going to teach it.
What surprised me was how much of the work turned out to be communication rather than modelling. Curious whether others found the same, or whether we were just under-prepared.
Same experience. We ended up running a two-hour board education session with no decisions on the agenda at all. It was the most valuable two hours of the quarter.
The risk committee asked a sharper question than I expected: what would make the CSM move without a change in underlying economics? Worth having an answer ready before they ask it.
This is the gap I write about. The standard assumes a reader who does not exist yet. An education budget is not a nice-to-have; it is part of the implementation.