Quota Share contracts generally deal with acquisition costs in one of two ways - premium is either ceded to the reinsurer on a ‘gross of acquisition cost’ basis and the reinsurer then pays a large ceding commission to cover acquisition costs and expenses, or premium is ceded on a ‘net of acquisition’ costs basis, in which case the reinsurer pays a smaller commission to the insurer, referred to as an overriding commission or ‘overrider’, which is intended to just cover internal expenses.

Another way of saying this is that premium is either ceded based on gross gross written premium, or gross net written premium.

I’ve been asked a few times over the years how to convert from a gross commission basis to the equivalent net commission basis, and vice versa. I've written up an explanation with the accompanying formulas  below.

It's still very early days to understand the true fallout from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but I thought it would be interesting to tally a few of the estimates for the insured loss we've seen so far, all of the below come from the Insider. 

Please note, I'm not endorsing any of these estimates, merely collating them for the interested reader! 

The Cefor curves provide quite a lot of ancillary info, interestingly (and hopefully you agree since you're reading this blog), had we not been provided with the 'proportion of all losses which come from total losses', we could have derived it by analysing the difference between the two curves (the partial loss and the all claims curve)

Below I demonstrate how to go from the 'partial loss' curve and the share of total claims % to the 'all claims' curve, but you could solve for any one of the three pieces of info given two of them using the formulas below.
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I hadn't see this before, but Cefor (the Nordic association of Marine Insurers), publishes Exposure Curves for Ocean Hull risks. Pretty useful if you are looking to price Marine RI. I've included a quick comparison to some London Market curves below and the source links below.

This post is a follow up to two previous posts, which I would recommend reading first:
https://www.lewiswalsh.net/blog/german-flooding-tail-position
https://www.lewiswalsh.net/blog/german-flooding-tail-position-update
 
Since our last post, the loss creep for the July 2021 German flooding has continued, sources are now talking about a EUR 8bn (\$9.3bn) insured loss. [1] This figure is just in respect of Germany, not including Belgium, France, etc., and up from \$8.3bn previously. 

But interestingly (and bear with me, I promise these is something interesting about this) when we compare this \$9.3bn loss to the OEP table in our previous modelling, it puts the flooding at just past a 1-in-200 level. 

Here are two events that you might think were linked:

Every year around the month of May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) releases their predictions on the severity of the forthcoming Atlantic Hurricane season.

Around the same time, US insurers will be busy negotiating their upcoming 1st June or 1st July annual reinsurance renewals with their reinsurance panel. At the renewal (for a price to be negotiated) they will purchase reinsurance which will in effect offload a portion of their North American windstorm risk.

You might reasonably think – ‘if there is an expectation that windstorms will be particularly severe this year, then more risk is being transferred and so the price should be higher’. And if the NOAA predicts an above average season, shouldn’t we expect more windstorms? In which case, wouldn't it make sense if the pricing zig-zags up and down in line with the NOAA predictions for the year?

Well in practice, no, it just doesn’t really happen like that. 

As I’m sure you are aware July 2021 saw some of the worst flooding in Germany in living memory. Die Welt currently has the death toll for Germany at 166 [1].

Obviously this is a very sad time for Germany, but one aspect of the reporting that caught my attention was how much emphasis was placed on climate change when reporting on the floods. For example, the BBC [2], the Guardian [3], and even the Telegraph [4] all bring up the role that climate change played in the contributing to the severity of the flooding.

The question that came to my mind, is can we really infer the presence of climate change just from this one event? The flooding has been described as a ‘1-in-100 year event’ [5], but does this bear out when we analyse the data, and how strong evidence is this of the presence of climate change? 
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I received an email from a reader recently asking the following (which for the sake of brevity and anonymity I’ve paraphrased quite liberally)

I’ve been reading about the Poisson Distribution recently and I understand that it is often used to model claims frequency, I’ve also read that the Poisson Distribution assumes that events occur independently. However, isn’t this a bit of a contradiction given the policyholders within a given risk profile are clearly dependent on each other?

It’s a good question; our intrepid reader is definitely on to something here. Let’s talk through the issue and see if we can gain some clarity.

Financial Year 2020 results have now been released for the top 5 reinsurers and on the face of it, they don’t make pretty reading. The top 5 reinsurers all exceeded 100% combined ratio, i.e. lost money this year on an underwriting basis. Yet much of the commentary has been fairly upbeat. Commentators have downplayed the top line result, and have instead focused on an ‘as-if’ position, how companies performed ex-Covid.
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We’ve had comments like the following, (anonymised because I don’t want to look like I’m picking on particular companies):

"Excluding the impact of Covid-19, [Company X] delivers a very strong operating capital generation"

“In the pandemic year 2020 [Company Y] achieved a very good result, thereby again demonstrating its superb risk-carrying capacity and its broad diversification.”

Obviously CEOs are going to do what CEOs naturally do - talk up their company, focus on the positives - but is there any merit in looking at an ex-Covid position, or is this a red herring and should we instead be focusing strictly on the incl-Covid results?

I actually think there is a middle ground we can take which tries to balance both perspectives, and I’ll elaborate that method below.

The term exposure inflation can refer to a couple of different phenomena within insurance. A friend mentioned a couple of weeks ago that he was looking up the term in the context of pricing a property cat layer and he stumbled on one of my blog posts where I use the term. Apparently my blog post was one of the top search results, and there wasn’t really much other useful info, but I was actually talking about a different type of exposure inflation, so it wasn’t really helpful for him.
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So as a public service announcement, for all those people Googling the term in the future, here are my thoughts on two types of exposure inflation:

I sometimes get emails from individuals who have stumbled across my website and have questions about Lloyd's of London which they can't find the answers to online. Below I've collated some of these questions and my responses, plus some extra questions chucked in which I thought might be helpful.

A brief caveat - while I've had a fair amount of interaction with Lloyd's syndicates over the years, I have never actually worked within Lloyd's for a syndicate, and these answers below just represent my understanding and my personal view, other views do exist! If you disagree with anything, or if you think anything below is incorrect please let me know!


Are Lloyd’s of London and Lloyds bank related at all?
They are not, they just happen to have a similar name. Lloyd’s of London is an insurance market, whereas Lloyd’s bank is a bank. They were both set up by people with the surname Lloyd - Lloyds bank was formed by John Taylor and Sampson Lloyd, Lloyd’s of London by Edward Lloyd. Perhaps in the mists of time those two were distantly related but that’s about it for a link.
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If you are an actuary, you'll probably have done a fair bit of triangle analysis, and you'll know that triangle analysis tends to works pretty well if you have what I'd call 'nice smooth consistent' data, that is - data without sharp corners, no large one off events, and without substantially growth. Unfortunately, over the last few years, motor triangles have been anything but nice, smooth or consistent. These days, using them often seems to require more assumptions than there are data points in the entire triangle.

What is a floating deductible?

Excess of Loss contacts for Aviation books, specifically those covering airline risks (planes with more than 50 seats) often use a special type of deductible,  called a floating deductible. Instead of applying a fixed amount to the loss in order to calculate recoveries, the deductible varies based on the size of the market loss and the line written by the insurer. These types of deductibles are reasonably common, I’d estimate something like 25% of airline accounts I’ve seen have had one.

As an aside, these policy features are almost always referred to as deductibles, but technically are not actually deductibles from a legal perspective, they should probably be referred to as floating attachment instead. The definition of a deductible requires that it be deducted from the policy limit rather than specifying the point above which the policy limit sits. That’s a discussion for another day though!

The idea is that the floating deductible should be lower for an airline on which an insurer takes a smaller line, and should be higher for an airline for which the insurer takes a bigger line. In this sense they operate somewhat like a surplus lines contract in property reinsurance.

Before I get into my issues with them, let’s quickly review how they work in the first place.

An example

When binding an Excess of Loss contract with a floating deductible, we need to specify the following values upfront:

• Limit = USD18.5m
• Fixed attachment = USD1.5m
• Original Market Loss = USD150m

And we need to know the following  additional information about a given loss in order to calculate recoveries from said loss:

• The insurer takes a 0.75% line on the risk
• The insurer’s limit is USD 1bn
• The risk suffers a USD 200m market loss.

A standard XoL recovery calculation with the fixed attachment given above, would first calculate the UNL (200m*0.75%=1.5m), and then deduct the fixed attachment from this (1.5m-1.5m=0). Meaning in this case, for this loss and this line size, nothing would be recovered from the XoL.

To calculate the recovery from XoL with a floating deductible, we would once again calculate the insured’s UNL 1.5m. However we now need to calculate the applicable deductible, this will be the lesser of 1.5m (the fixed attachment), and the insurer’s effective line (defined as their UNL divided by the market loss = 1.5m/200m) multiplied by the Original Market Loss as defined in the contract. In this case, the effective line would be 0.75%, and the Original Market Loss would be 150m, hence; 0.75%*150m = 1.125m. Since this is less than the 1.5m fixed attachment, the attachment we should use is 1.125m our limit is always just 18.5m, and doesn’t change if the attachment drops down. We would therefore calculate recoveries to this contract, for this loss size and risk, as if the layer was a 18.5m xs 1.125. Meaning the ceded loss would be 0.375m, and the net position would be 1.125m.
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Here’s the same calculation in an easier to follow format:

So…. what’s the issue?

This may seem quite sensible so far, however the issue is with the wording. The following is an example of a fairly standard London Market wording, taken from an anonymised slip which I came across a few years ago.

Priority: USD 10,000,000 each and every loss or an amount equal to the “Reinsured’s Portion’  of the total Original Insured Loss sustained by the original insured(s) of USD 200,000,000 each and every loss, whichever the lesser.
…
Reinsuring Clause
Reinsurers shall only be liable if and when the ultimate net loss paid by the Reinsured in respect of the interest as defined herein exceeds USD 10,000,000 each and every loss or an amount equal to the Reinsured’s Proportion of the total Original Insured Loss sustained by the original insured(s) of USD 200,000,000 or currency equivalent, each and every loss, whichever the lesser (herein referred to as the “Priority”)
For the purpose herein, the Reinsured’s Proportion shall be deemed to be a percentage calculated as follows, irrespective of the attachment dates of the policies giving rise to the Reinsured’s ultimate net loss and the Original Insured Loss:
Reinsured Ultimate Net Loss
/
Original Insured Loss
…
The Original Insured Loss shall be defined as the total amount incurred by the insurance industry including any proportional co-insurance and or self-insurance of the original insured(s), net of any recovery from any other source
What’s going on here is that we’ve defined the effective line to be the Reinsured’s unl divided by the 100% market loss.

First problem

From a legal perspective, how would an insurer (or reinsurer for that matter), prove what the 100% insured market loss is? The insurer obviously knows their share of the loss, however what if this is a split placement with 70% placed in London on the same slip, 15% placed in a local market (let’s say Indonesia?), and a shortfall cover (15%) placed in Bermuda. Due to the different jurisdictions, let’s say the Bermudian cover has a number of exclusions and subjectivities, and the Indonesian cover operates under the Indonesian legal system which does not publically disclose private contract details.

Even if the insurer is able to find out through a friendly broker what the other markets are paying, and therefore have a good sense of what the 100% market loss is, they may not have a legal right to this information. The airline does have a legal right to the information, however the reinsurance contract is a contract between the insured and reinsured, the airline is not a party to the reinsurance contract. The point is whether the insurer and reinsured have the legal right to the information.

The above issues may sound quite theoretical, and in practice there are normally no issues with collecting on these types of contracts. But to my mind, legal language should bear up to scrutiny even when stretched – that’s precisely when you are going to rely on it.  My contention is that as a general rule, it is a bad idea to rely on information in a contract which you do not have an automatic legal right to obtain.

The second problem

The intention with this wording, and with contracts of this form is that the effective line should basically be the same as the insured’s signed line. Assuming everything is straightforward, if the insurer takes a x% line with a limit of Y bn. If the loss is anything less than Y bn, then the insured’s effective line will simply be x%*Size of Loss / Size of loss. i.e. x%.

My guess as to why it is worded this way rather than just taking the actual signed line is that we don’t want to open ourselves to a issues around what exactly we mean by ‘the signed line’ – what if the insured has exposure through two contracts both of which have different signed lines, what if there is an inuring Risk Excess which effectively nets down the gross signed line – should we then use the gross or net line? By couching the contract in terms of UNLs and Market losses we attempt to avoid these ambiguities

Let me give you a scenario though where this wording does fall down:

Scenario 1 – clash loss

Let’s suppose there is a mid-air collision between two planes. Each results in an insured market loss of USD 1bn, then the Original Insured Loss is  USD 2bn. If our insurer takes a 10% line on the first airline, but does not write the second airline, then their effective line is 10% * 1bn / 2bn = 5%... hmmm this is definitely equal to their signed line of 10%.

You may think this is a pretty remote possibility, after all in the history of modern commercial aviation such an event has not occurred. What about the following scenario which does occur fairly regularly?

Scenario 2 – airline/manufacturer split liability

Suppose now there is a loss involving a single plane, and the size of the loss is once again USD 1bn, and that our insurer once again has a 10% line. In this case though, what if the manufacturer is found 50% responsible? Now the insurer only has a UNL of USD 500m, and yet once again, in the calculation of their floating deductible, we do the following:  10% * 500m/1bn = 5%.

Hmmm, once again our effective line is below our signed line, and the floating deductible will drop down even further than intended.

Suggested alternative wording

My suggested wording, and I’m not a lawyer so this is categorically not legal advice, is to retain the basic definition of effective line - as UNL divided by some version of the 100% market loss -  by doing so we still neatly sidestep the issues mentioned above around gross vs net lines, or exposure from multiple slips, but instead to replace the definition of Original Insured Loss with some variation of the following ‘the proportion of the Original Insured Loss, for which the insured derives a UNL through their involvement in some contract of insurance, or otherwise’.

Basically the intention is to restrict the market loss, only to those contracts through which the insurer has an involvement. This deals with both issues – the insurer would not be able to net down their line further through references to insured losses which are nothing to do with them, as in the case of scenario 1 and 2 above, and secondly it restrict the information requirements to contracts which the insurer has an automatic legal right to have knowledge of since by definition they will be a party to the contract.

I did run this idea past a few reinsurance brokers a couple of years ago, and they thought it made sense. The only downside from their perspective is that it makes the client's reinsurance slightly less responsive i.e. they knew about the strange quirk whereby the floating deductible dropped in the event of a manufacturer involvement, and saw it as a bonus for their client, which was often not fully priced in by the reinsurer. They therefore had little incentive to attempt to drive through such a change. The only people who would have an incentive to push through this change would be the larger reinsurers, though I suspect they will not do so until they've already been burnt and attempted to rely on the wording in a court case and, at which point they may find it does not quite operate in the way they intended.