Reinsurance
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Reinsurance is a means by which an insurance company can protect itself against the risk of losses with other insurance companies. Individuals and corporations obtain insurance policies to provide protection for various risks (hurricanes, earthquakes, lawsuits, collisions, sickness and death, etc.). Reinsurers, in turn, provide insurance to insurance companies.
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[edit] Functions of reinsurance
There are many reasons an insurance company will choose to reinsure as part of its responsibility to manage a portfolio of risks for the benefit of its policyholders and investors.
[edit] Risk transfer
The main use of reinsurance is to allow the ceding company to assume individual risks greater than its size would otherwise allow, and to protect the cedant against catastrophic losses. Reinsurance allows an insurance company to offer larger limits of protection to a policyholder than its own capital would otherwise allow. If an insurance company can safely write only $5 million in limits on any one policy, it can reinsure (or cede) the amount of the limits in excess of $5 million to reinsurers.
Reinsurance’s highly refined uses in recent years include applications where reinsurance was used as part of a carefully planned hedge strategy.
[edit] Income smoothing
Reinsurance can help to make an insurance company’s results more predictable by absorbing larger losses and reducing the amount of capital needed to provide coverage.
[edit] Surplus relief
Reinsurance can improve an insurance company's balance sheet by reducing the amount of liabilities, and thereby increasing surplus. Surplus = assets less liabilities, is roughly the same as shareholder equity on a balance sheet of a non-insurance company.
[edit] Arbitrage
The insurance company may be motivated by arbitrage in purchasing reinsurance coverage at a lower rate than what they charge the insured for the underlying risk.
[edit] Types of reinsurance
[edit] Proportional
Proportional reinsurance (mostly known as quota share reinsurance) involves one or more reinsurers taking a stated percent share of each policy that an insurer produces ("writes"). This means that the reinsurer will receive that stated percentage of each dollar of premiums and will pay that percentage of each dollar of losses. In addition, the reinsurer will allow a "ceding commission" to the insurer to compensate the insurer for the costs of writing and administering the business (agents' commissions, modeling, paperwork, etc.).
The insurer may seek such coverage for several reasons. First, the insurer may not have sufficient capital to prudently retain all of the exposure that it is capable of producing. For example, it may only be able to offer $1 million in coverage, but by purchasing proportional reinsurance it might double or triple that limit. Premiums and losses are then shared on a pro rata basis. For example, an insurance company might purchase a 50% quota share treaty; in this case they would share half of all premium and losses with the reinsurer. In a 75% quota share, they would share (cede) 3/4th of all premiums and losses.
The other (lesser known) form of proportional reinsurance is surplus share. In this case, a “line” is defined as a certain policy limit - say $100,000. In a 9 line surplus share treaty the reinsurer could then accept up to $900,000 (9 lines). So if the insurance company issues a policy for $100,000, they would keep all of the premiums and losses from that policy. If they issue a $200,000 policy, they would give (cede) half of the premiums and losses to the reinsurer (1 line each). If they issue a $.
[edit] Non-proportional (excess of loss)
Non-proportional reinsurance, also known as excess of loss reinsurance, only responds if the loss suffered by the insurer exceeds a certain amount, called the retention. An example of this form of reinsurance is where the insurer is prepared to accept a loss of $1 million for any loss which may occur and purchases a layer of reinsurance of $4m in excess of $1 million - if a loss of $3 million occurs the insurer pays the $3 million to the insured(s), and then recovers $2 million from their reinsurer(s). In this example, the insurer will retain any loss not exceeding $5 million unless they have purchased a further excess layer (second layer) of say $10 million excess of $5 million. Excess of loss reinsurance can have two forms - “Per Risk” or “Per Occurrence” (Catastrophe or “Cat”). In per risk, the cedant’s insurance policy limits are greater than the reinsurance retention. For example, an insurance company might insure commercial property risks with policy limits up to $10 million and then buy per risk reinsurance of $5 million in excess of $5 million. In this case a loss of $6 million on that policy will result in the recovery of $1 million from the reinsurer. In catastrophe excess of loss, the cedant’s insurance policy limits must be less than the reinsurance retention. For example, an insurance company issues homeowner's policy limits of up to $500,000 and then buys catastrophe reinsurance of $22,000,000 in excess of $3,000,000. In that case, the insurance company would only recover from reinsurers in the event of multiple losses in one event (i.e., hurricane, earthquake, etc.).
[edit] Contracts
Most of the above examples concern reinsurance contracts that cover more than one policy (treaty). Reinsurance can also be purchased on a per policy basis, in which case it is known as facultative reinsurance. Facultative reinsurance can be written on either a quota share or excess of loss basis. Facultative reinsurance is commonly used for large or unusual risks that do not fit within standard reinsurance treaties due to their exclusions. The term of a facultative agreement coincides with the term of the policy. Facultative reinsurance is usually purchased by the insurance underwriter who underwrote the original insurance policy, whereas treaty reinsurance is typically purchased by a senior executive at the insurance company.
Reinsurance treaties can either be written on a “continuous” or “term” basis. A continuous contract continues indefinitely, but generally has a “notice” period whereby either party can give its intent to cancel or amend the treaty within 90 days. A term agreement has a built-in expiration date. It is common for insurers and reinsurers to have long term relationships that span many years.
[edit] Markets
Many reinsurance placements are not placed with a single reinsurer but are shared between a number of reinsurers. (For example a $30,000,000 xs of $20,000,000 layer may be shared by 30 reinsurers with a $1,000,000 participation each.) The reinsurer who sets the terms (premium and contract conditions) for the reinsurance contract is called the lead reinsurer; the other companies subscribing to the contract are called following reinsurers (they follow the lead).
About half of all reinsurance is handled by reinsurance brokers who then place business with reinsurance companies. The other half is with “direct writing” reinsurers who have their own production staff and thus reinsure insurance companies directly.
Using game-theoretic modeling, Professors Michael R. Powers (Temple University) and Martin Shubik (Yale University) have argued that the number of active reinsurers in a given national market should be approximately equal to the square-root of the number of primary insurers active in the same market.[1] Econometric analysis has provided empirical support for the Powers-Shubik rule.[2]
[edit] Retrocession
Reinsurance companies themselves also purchase reinsurance and this is known as a retrocession. They purchase this reinsurance from other reinsurance companies. The reinsurance company who sells the reinsurance in this scenario are known as “retrocessionaires.” The reinsurance company that purchases the reinsurance is known as the “retrocedent.”
It is not unusual for a reinsurer to buy reinsurance protection from other reinsurers. For example, a reinsurer that provides proportional, or pro rata, reinsurance capacity to insurance companies may wish to protect its own exposure to catastrophes by buying excess of loss protection. Another situation would be that a reinsurer which provides excess of loss reinsurance protection may wish to protect itself against an accumulation of losses in different branches of business which may all become affected by the same catastrophe. This may happen when a windstorm causes damage to property, automobiles, boats, aircraft and loss of life.
This process can sometimes continue until the original reinsurance company unknowingly gets some of its own business (and therefore its own liabilities) back. This is known as a “spiral” and was common in some specialty lines of business such as marine and aviation. Sophisticated reinsurance companies are aware of this danger and through careful underwriting attempt to avoid it.
In the 1980s, the London market was badly affected by the intentional creation of reinsurance spirals, which concentrated risks into the hands of a few reinsurance syndicates. A series of catastrophic losses in the late 1980s bankrupted these syndicates causing many ceding insurance companies to lose their effective coverage.
It is important to note that the insurance company is obliged to indemnify its policyholder for the loss under the insurance policy whether or not the reinsurer reimburses the insurer. Many insurance companies have experienced difficulties by purchasing reinsurance from reinsurance companies that did not or could not pay their share of the loss.
In a 50% quota share the insurance company could then be left with half the premium and the entire loss. This is a genuine concern when purchasing reinsurance from a reinsurer that is not domiciled in the same country as the insurer. Remember that losses come after the premium, and for certain lines of casualty business (e.g. asbestos or pollution) the losses can come many, many years later.
[edit] See also
- Catastrophe modeling
- Financial reinsurance
- Reinsurance Sidecar
- Catastrophe bond
- Industry Loss Warranties
- Life Insurance Securitization
- Industry Loss Warranties
[edit] References
- ^ Powers, M. R. and Shubik, M., 2006, "A 'Square-Root Rule' for Reinsurance," Revista de Contabilidade e Finanças (Review of Accounting and Finance), 17, 5, 101-107.
- ^ Venezian, E. C., Viswanathan, K. S., and Jucá, Iana B., 2005, "A 'Square-Root Rule' for Reinsurance? Evidence from Several National Markets," Journal of Risk Finance, 6, 4, 319-334.
