Reinsurance is about the consumer and the insurance company both. Everyone benefits from reinsurance in a big way.
Reinsurance for the insurance company
Reinsurance is the only thing that allows insurance companies to take such big risks. It is this reinsurance that allows them to insure as much as they often do. Without the reinsurance they will not be able to.
You see an insurance company never knows when they will have to pay out and to how many people in any given year. They are actually insuring more than they would be able to afford to pay out all at once, that is where reinsurance comes into the picture. By reinsuring the amounts they will be able to pass some of the risk to other insurance companies thus giving the consumer a larger benefit package. For the consumer this means higher insurance policies and larger payouts.
The transferring of risk
By transferring the risk the insurance company will be less likely to go bankrupt and close. They will be bale to continue to do business and they will not have to worry about the losses that they incur each year because everything will flow smoothly with the help of this reinsurance. The company will not have to have so much capital at all times, giving them much more leeway in their business.
Most insurance companies are able to get this reinsurance at much lower rates that you or I could get insurance. The benefits of reinsurance do not just end with the company being able to write bigger policies for the insured but it also lowers their liability which is something that all insurance companies want.
How reinsurance is written
Reinsurance contracts can be write to cover single insurance policies or they can cover many more than just one. Most insurance companies have reinsurance policies that cover much of the business that they do. They will have to get these individual reinsurance policies in some cases when an insurance policy poses a more serious risk.
Reinsuring the reinsurer
Even reinsurance companies buy reinsurance. It is a continuous cycle of insuring the insured, it may sound confusing but it is all about protecting everyones interests. This is why you can get the insurance that you need to keep you and your family safe and secure.
Functions of Reinsurance
Protecting against catastrophic events is only one kind 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.
Risk transfer
The main uses of reinsurance are 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 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.
Reinsurances highly refined uses in recent years include applications where reinsurance was used as part of a carefully planned hedge strategy.
Income smoothing
Reinsurance can help to make an insurance companies results more predictable by absorbing larger losses and reducing the amount of capital needed to provide coverage.
Surplus relief
Reinsurance can improve an insurance company's balance sheet by reducing the amount of net liability, and thereby increasing surplus. Surplus, assets less liabilities, is roughly the same as shareholder equity on a balance sheet of a non-insurance company.
Arbitrage
The insurance company may be motivated by arbitrage in purchasing reinsurance coverage at a lower rate than what they believe the cost is for the underlying risk.
Proportional
Proportional reinsurance (mostly known as quota share reinsurance) is where the reinsurer takes a stated percent share of each policy the insurer writes and then shares in the premiums and losses in that same proportion. The size of the insurer might only allow it to write a risk with a policy limit of up to $1 million, 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's of all premiums and losses. The reinsurance company usually pays a commission on the premiums back to the insurer in order to compensate them for costs incurred in sourcing and administering (e.g. retail brokerage, taxes, fees, home office expenses) the business (usually 20-30%) This is known as the ceding commission.
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 $500,000 policy, they would cede 80% of the premiums and losses on that policy to the reinsurer (1 line to the company, 4 lines to the reinsurer 4/5 = 80%) If they issue the maximum policy limit of $1,000,000 the Reinsurer would then get 90% of all of the premiums and losses from that policy.
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 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 cedants 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 cedants 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.)
This same principle applies to casualty reinsurance except that in the case of Catastrophe excess the word Clash is used.
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.
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.
Retrocession
Reinsurance companies themselves also purchase reinsurance and this is known as a retrocession. They purchase this reinsurance from other reinsurance companies, who are then 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 which 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 their policyholder for the loss under the insurance policy whether or not the Reinsurer actually reimburses the Insurer. Many insurance companies have gotten into trouble 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.
Financial reinsurance, also known as fin re, is a form of reinsurance which is focused more on capital management than on risk transfer.
One of the particular difficulties of running an insurance company is that its financial results - and hence its profitability - tend to be uneven from one year to the next. Since insurance companies want, above all else, to produce consistent results, they are always attracted to ways of hoarding this year's profit to pay for next year's possible losses. Financial reinsurance is one means by which insurance companies can smooth their results.
A pure fin re contract tends to cover a multi-year period, during which the premium is held and invested by the reinsurer. It is returned to the ceding company - minus a pre-determined profit-margin for the reinsurer - either when the period has elapsed, or when the ceding company suffers a loss.
Fin re therefore differs from conventional reinsurance because most of the premium is returned whether there is a loss or not: little or no risk-transfer has taken place.
History
Fin re has been around since at least the 1960s, when Lloyds syndicates started sending money overseas as reinsurance premium for what were then called roll-overs - multi-year contracts with specially-established vehicles in tax-light jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands. These deals were legal and approved by the UK tax-authorities. However they fell into disrepute after some years, partly because their tax-avoiding motivation became obvious, and partly because of a few cases where the overseas funds were siphoned-off or simply stolen.
More recently, the high-profile bankruptcy of the HIH group of insurance companies in Australia revealed that highly questionable transactions had been propping-up the balance-sheet for some years prior to failure. To be clear, although fin re contracts were involved, it was the fraudulent accounting for those contracts - and not the actual use of fin re - which was the problem. As of June 2006, General Re and others are being sued by the HIH liquidator in connection with the fraudulent practices.
The regulator's perspective
When looking at the financial position of a Life insurer, the company's assets and liabilities are measured. The difference is called the 'free assets' of the company. The greater the free assets relative to the liabilities, the more 'solvent' the company is deemed to be.
There are different ways of measuring assets and liabilities - it depends on who is looking. The regulator, who is interested in ensuring that insurance companies remain solvent so that they can meet their liabilities to policyholders, tends to under-estimate assets and over-estimate liabilities.
In taking this conservative perspective, one of the steps taken is to effectively ignore future profits. On the one hand this makes sense - it's not prudent to anticipate future profits. On the other hand, for an entire portfolio of policies, although some may lapse - statistically we can rely on a number to still be around to contribute to the company's future profits.
Future profits can thus be seen to be an inadmissible asset - an asset which may not (from the regulator's point of view, anyway) be taken into account.
A banker's perspective
If a bank were to give the insurer a loan, the insurer's assets would increase by the amount of the loan, but their liabilities would increase by the same amount too - because they owe that money back to the bank.
With both assets and liabilities increasing by the same amount, the free assets remain unchanged. This is generally a sensible thing, but it's not what financial reinsurance is aiming for.
The reinsurer's perspective
In setting up a financial reinsurance treaty, the reinsurer will provide capital (there are a number of ways of doing this, discussed below). In return, the insurer will pay the capital back over time. The key here is to ensure that repayments only come out of surplus emerging from the reinsured block of business. The benefit of this surplus-limitation comes from the fact that in the regulatory accounts there is no value ascribed to future profits - which means the liability to repay the reinsurer is made from a series of payments which are deemed to be zero.
The impact is that there is an increase in assets (from the financing), but no increase in liabilities. In other words, financial reinsurance increases the company's free assets.
Different accounting regimes
It's important to be clear that financial reinsurance has an impact on the regulatory balance sheet only - which itself already provides a distorted view of a company's solvency. Financial reinsurance, certainly for life insurers, has no impact on their GAAP accounts. It does not disort a company's shareholder-reported profits.
A lot of the bad press around financial reinsurance is because of inappropriate designs and incorrect accounting for the transaction. It is not a problem of financial reinsurance itself.
Assumption reinsurance
Assumption reinsurance is a form of reinsurance whereby the reinsurer is substituted for the ceding insurer and becomes directly liable for policy claims. This ordinarily requires a notice and release from affected policyholders. In the more typical reinsurance arrangement, the reinsurer has an obligation to indemnify the ceding insurer, which remains liable for claims on policies it has issued, and policyholders' approval is not required.
