Reinsurance News
Coronavirus news coverage of relevance to reinsurance and insurance markets.
All of our Covid-19 coronavirus news, analysis and insight related to insurance and reinsurance market impacts can be found below.
The coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic of 2019-20 resulted in significant disruption and threatened losses widely across the insurance and reinsurance markets.
2nd October 2020
The New South Wales Court of Appeal has now heard the legal argument in relation to the business interruption test case lodged by the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA), according to Chief Executive Officer Andrew Hall. The test case consisted of two separate small business claims that were lodged with ... Read the full article
2nd October 2020
The Hiscox Action Group, which earlier this month won a High Court ruling on the validity of their COVID-19 related Business Interruption claims, have released a statement criticising the volume of claims that remain unpaid. The Hiscox Action Group consists of 400 Hiscox policyholders whose coronavirus-related business interruption claims had ... Read the full article
1st October 2020
While US property-casualty insurers' results in the second half of 2020 will continue to be impacted by COVID-related insured losses and premium volume declines, significant hurricane and wildfire losses are likely to emerge as the greater threat to profitability, according to Fitch Ratings. Fitch says the full-year 2020 combined ratio will likely ... Read the full article
30th September 2020
While the re/insurance industry can't do it alone, taking the stance that the sector can't insure pandemic risk at all is a mistake, according to John Keogh, Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer (COO), Chubb. Keogh discussed the industry's response to the COVID-19 crisis and its role in future pandemic ... Read the full article
29th September 2020
Ratings agency, S&P Global Ratings has released a report which shows how insurers' capital buffers are proving resilient, despite the COVID-19 pandemic. It reported that while COVID-19 financial market stresses could have wiped out up to 85% of the global insurance industry's capital buffer at the beginning of 2020, a cushion ... Read the full article
29th September 2020
The UK insurance industry has proved its resilience throughout the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the uncertainty of Brexit, Lloyds Bank has said. The fifth annual Financial Institutions Sentiment Survey released by Lloyds Bank gathers views from major banks, asset and wealth management firms, insurers and intermediaries. As COVID-19 is expected to ... Read the full article
28th September 2020
David Brown, Chairman and interim CEO of Bermuda-based reinsurer Hamilton Re, has warned that longer-tailed casualty lines could face exposure to indirect losses arising out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Speaking in an interview with Reinsurance News, Brown noted that there are exposures to claims-made policies in long-tail lines that may only ... Read the full article
28th September 2020
The Economic Secretary to the Treasury has written to the Director General of the Association of British Insurers (ABI), Huw Evans, after ABI members confirmed they will not make deductions from business interruption insurance claims payments to account for government grant funds. John Glen welcomed the commitment to omit the Coronavirus ... Read the full article
28th September 2020
Data and analytics company GlobalData has recommended that insurers should increasingly focus on larger small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) following the COVID-19 outbreak. Analysts found that 8.5% of SMEs said they were more likely to purchase cyber insurance since the start of the pandemic, and among medium-sized SMEs this figure rose ... Read the full article
28th September 2020
Analysts at GlobalData have highlighted Ping An as one of few established insurers to have provided a strong proactive response to the COVID-19 pandemic for its customers. According to GlobalData’s thematic insurance scorecard, the chinese insurer was ranked considerably better than its nearest competitors in the COVID-19 response. The company's score was ... Read the full article
25th September 2020
Helios Underwriting has announced a £108,000 operating loss for the first half of 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic causing a reduction in underwriting profits. The company says cumulative rate increases since 1 January 2018 are 28%. Losses of £5 million have been reserved for COVID-19 by the supported syndicates, of which 85% ... Read the full article
24th September 2020
Analysts at Morgan Stanley do not expect other re/insurers to follow Beazley in significantly increasing revisions in COVID-19 event cancellation loss estimates. It's understood the impact of events cancelled in the third and fourth quarter will likely be more modest than in the first half of 2020. Beazley has increased its estimated ... Read the full article
24th September 2020
A group of policyholders have written to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to report that some insurers are still refusing to pay out on business interruption (BI) claims, even after the UK High Court’s ruling last week. The court sided with policyholders in a landmark judgement that obligated UK re/insurers ... Read the full article
22nd September 2020
Re/insurance broker Aon continues to see value in the global reinsurance industry, even as markets evolve in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Reinsurance remains an accretive form of capital for insurers in managing volatility and Aon notes that risk transfer over the last six months has demonstrated the value reinsurance ... Read the full article
22nd September 2020
The half-year results of property and casualty (P&C) reinsurers show that most firms have recovered from the effects of the financial market volatility that followed global lockdown measures in Q1, according to analysts at DBRS Morningstar. DBRS’ review of H1 results shows that most large reinsurers reported positive net earnings for ... Read the full article
