(paragraphs 14-24 of IFRS 17)

BC119 Once the Board had decided that the contractual service margin should be measured for a group, the Board considered what that group level should be. The Board considered whether it could draw on requirements for groups set by insurance regulators. However, as noted in paragraph BC15, regulatory requirements focus on solvency not on reporting financial performance. The decisions about grouping in IFRS 17 were driven by considerations about reporting profits and losses in appropriate reporting periods. For example, in some cases the entity issues two groups of insurance contracts expecting that, on average, the contracts in one group will be more profitable than the contracts in the other group. In such cases, the Board decided, in principle, there should be no offsetting between the two groups of insurance contracts because that offsetting could result in a loss of useful information. In particular, the Board noted that the less profitable group of contracts would have a lesser ability to withstand unfavourable changes in estimates and might become onerous before the more profitable group would do so. The Board regards information about onerous contracts as useful information about an entity's decisions on pricing contracts and about future cash flows, and wanted this information to be reported on a timely basis. The Board did not want this information to be obscured by offsetting onerous contracts in one group with profitable contracts in another.