Reinsurance - How Insurance Companies Manage Risk (2024)

Insurance Companies Need Protection Too Though

What if a natural disaster hits our neighborhood, a wildfire we’ll say, and all 100 of the homes burn down at the same time. Now, the $150,000 they take in per year is just a drop in the bucket compared to the $10 million this will cost to cover the claims.

Some natural disasters can claim many more homes than this, and while they may feel comfortable with the normal distribution of risk, the risks in these situations may be too great for them to bear themselves, just like our own one home may be too much for us to bear losing.

The same principle applies in both cases, it’s that the risk would comprise too much of our capital and the bigger risks of many claims from disasters may also comprise too much of an insurance company’s capital. So what can insurance companies do here?

Well insurance involves spreading risk and insurance companies can spread some of this risk, share it in essence, with other insurance companies, ones that specialize in stepping in and providing insurance to insurers. They are called reinsurers.

Reinsurers play an essential role in the insurance business, because without them, without the ability of insurance companies to reassign part of their risks to reinsurers, they would not be able to offer certain forms of coverage to their clients.

So if you wanted to buy insurance against certain natural disasters, well some insurance companies may already be hesitant to offer certain coverages, but without reinsurance you probably would never be able to get these coverages from anyone.

It’s not a matter of the risk being too great, for instance if you live in a flood plain you may not be able to get flood insurance merely because of the specific risk, but we’re not talking about that here. We’re speaking of the cumulative risk of these events since they result in many claims being brought when they do happen. The claims can run into the billions of dollars in total.

Now insurance companies could take on a select number of clients, as many as they could manage themselves, but there’s only so many insurance companies in the market and this would likely leave most people out in the cold, after the maximum amount was allotted.

The Huge Reinsurance Market

Reinsurance is a huge industry, with over half a trillion dollars in reserve at any given time, called the float, to cover future claims. While insurance companies do invest their float, it’s of a shorter term nature, while reinsurance companies deal more with massive claims that happen far less often and therefore tend to hold a higher percentage of their premiums in reserve.

This does allow reinsurance companies to make significant gains over time from the investment of their float, all the while providing necessary security to insurance companies that they insure. Warren Buffet made a great deal of his fortune investing the float of Berkshire Hathaway, which he built up to be one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies.

Buffet is considered the father of the modern reinsurance business, and his wise investments of the massive amount of float that he’s had access to over the past few decades has propelled his company into what is now the third largest company in the world by market value, only behind Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

So that’s how big reinsurance is, and Berkshire Hathaway is just one of several huge reinsurance companies in the market, and in fact are only in fifth place by volume of business. So this tells us that a great deal of insurance risk gets reassigned to reinsurers, and this is definitely the case.

Most people aren’t even aware of the reinsurance market, as they operate completely behind the scenes, even though many of the world’s largest insurance companies either don’t offer insurance directly or most of their business is through reinsurance.

How Reinsurance Works

Reinsurance basically offers insurance companies the ability to write more insurance, which will always be limited to the amount of risk that they are exposed to. So in other words the money they collect will yield a certain float which will limit how much risk they can take on.

By reassigning some of this risk to reinsurers, they can focus even more on their specialty, which is to manage risk in bulk, where the total risk taken on can be easily managed through the law of large numbers. So this isn’t unlike a casino setting limits on the size of wagers, as if the wagers are kept from getting too large, they can really take on an unlimited amount of them.

If a casino were to take on bets of a size that they weren’t comfortable with, then the casino itself may be at risk, if these huge bettors had too much luck for instance. An extreme example of this would be a very wealthy person betting the value of the entire casino on a coin toss. This would not be acceptable at all to the casino. Casinos manage this through setting betting limits, but insurance companies don’t have this luxury, but they have another way.

So the biggest effect of reinsurance is to increase the capacity of retail insurance companies, so that they can satisfy the demand of the retail insurance market. Reinsurance also adds stability to the holdings of insurance companies, and both of these are benefits to retail clients, by not only keeping premiums down by not requiring insurance companies to maintain much larger floats, but by also better ensuring that their claims will be paid out if a major catastrophe occurs.

Reinsurance companies are happy to do this because on their end they get to make money off of the premiums they charge, and this is the major way that these companies make their profits.

Reinsurers offer two main services to insurers. They will either enter into contracts to cover losses from specific events, where the losses may be huge, or they may enter into treaties with insurance companies to cover a certain percentage of their losses overall.

The specific contracts allow insurance companies to maintain stability in the face of excessive risk, while treaties allow them to write more insurance and expand their business without having to worry about increasing their total risk exposure beyond what they are comfortable with.

Both of these types do allow insurance companies to better serve the needs of their clients though, and it’s certainly not healthy to have your insurance company exposed to too much risk, because they are the ones that we rely on and pay to manage this risk for us.

Within these two main categories are a variety of arrangements that can be made between reinsurers and insurers, all designed to help insurance companies manage the risks that they take on. Like insurance, reinsurance is tailored to the particular needs and risks of the client, only this time insurance companies are the clients, not the public.

The reinsurance market has really tightened up though over the last few years, primarily due to the lower interest rate environment that we’re in now, and even Warren Buffet has lightened his holdings in the market due to this. Still though, it’s still a mammoth industry, but it’s become a lot more competitive over the last few years, which itself will drive down return on investment.

So reinsurance has become an essential component of the insurance market that we know today, and serves to solidify and make more efficient the business of taking on the risks of others for a fee.

Reinsurance FAQs

• What is the purpose of reinsurance?

  Reinsurance is to insurers as insurance is to us. We buy insurance when we cannot manage certain events on our own financially, and insurance companies buy insurance against events that they cannot manage on their own, such as massive losses caused by natural disasters. This ultimately allows insurers to over coverage against these big disasters.

• What is reinsurance example?

  Let’s say you have coverage for your home for hurricane damage and you live in a high-risk area for this. Many others in your area as well as in the proximity for hurricanes will have this coverage as well. If a hurricane comes, they can cause billions of dollars’ worth of damage, amounts that the insurer cannot manage. So, they purchase reinsurance to cover this part.

• What is the difference between reinsurance and insurance?

  Insurance is provided to policyholders by insurance companies, in a direct to consumer manner. Reinsurance is taken out by insurance companies to ensure that their obligations are covered, in the same way and for the same reasons as we take it out. Reinsurance covers our insurer’s excess risk.

• How does reinsurance make money?

  Reinsurers make money two ways. They charge the companies that they provide reinsurance to a premium, just like with all insurance, and they also make money from investing the assets that they hold in reserve for future claims. The investment part is how Warren Buffett made his fortune, although no one has been able to quite duplicate that feat.

• What are the advantages of reinsurance?

  Reinsurance serves to add liquidity to the insurance market, meaning that its capacity to absorb and manage risk is increased. The ability of your insurance company to do this is limited, and limited by the portion of their risk that they do not transfer to reinsurers. This serves to make the insurance market more efficient by increasing supply to meet demand.

• What do reinsurance companies do?

  Reinsurance companies provide insurance coverage to insurance companies, who purchase coverage to allow them to take on more business than they could otherwise, and pass the unmanageable risk that this creates for them to a company that is more capable of bearing it. If not for this, the amount of coverage that insurance companies could offer would be limited.

• What are the types of reinsurance?

  The 7 types of reinsurance are facultative coverage, reinsurance treaty, proportional reinsurance, non-proportional reinsurance, excess of loss reinsurance, risk-attaching reinsurance, and loss-occurring coverage. This allows the coverage to be better tailored to specific needs.

• What are reinsurance assets?

  Insurance companies require assets to cover future potential liabilities. Reinsurance companies share in the premium that insurance companies collect from their clients, adding this to their asset reserve. Reinsurers also invest these assets to create further assets from the positive returns that these investments provide.

• How is reinsurance premium calculated?

  All insurance premiums are risk calculations based upon known factors, so the basics of calculating reinsurance premiums are the same. There are certain types of calculations that are relied on more with reinsurance, due to the nature of their business, such as catastrophe modelling, systemic risk, and risk aggregation.

• What is reinsurance allowance?

  A reinsurance allowance, or a ceding allowance, is money that is paid by the reinsurer to the ceding company as a sort of commission for transferring risk and premiums to the reinsurer. This involves providing the ceding company a discount on the risk that they passed on, due to efficiencies involved with reinsurance.

• What is risk premium reinsurance?

  Risk premium reinsurance involves the reinsurer taking on a portion of an insurance company’s risk, at a specified premium over the term of the contract, based upon an assessment of the risk involved plus expenses and profit margins. This allows the insurance company to pass on the risk they need to and the reinsurer to get compensated suitably.