Flows in Life Insurance
- 01:59
Understand how cash flows feed into the balance sheet and profits
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Glossary
GWP Life Insurance Flows Life Insurance ModelTranscript
Before we build a life insurance model it can be helpful to remind ourselves what the flows are within the financials of a life insurance company. And what I mean by flows is the way that cash flows into the business and how that feeds into the balance sheet and also into the profits. Now, a sensible place to start is with gross risk and premium. So each year, as the life insurance company writes new policies, that results in gross written premium flowing into the life insurance company. However, also clearly the life insurance company will have to pay out some money to policy holders and that will either be through the benefits paid or from the surrender of existing policies. Now the net of these two, the gross written premium and the benefits paid and surrenders, is the net cash flows from policy holders. And clearly, when this is a net cash inflow this should lead to growth in the insurance provisions, as some of the premiums received are reserved to cover future benefits. Now, although these insurance provisions are liabilities in the balance sheet, it's not a bad thing that these are growing. On the contrary, it reflects the growth of the business. And in fact, we can start to think of the insurance profits, that is the premiums less the benefits expense, as a return or a margin on the insurance reserves. For a European life insurance company this return would be referred to as the technical margin. So effectively, the insurance reserves are a form of capital, albeit a free source and the company is generating a return on this capital. Now, when we have these net cash flows from policy holders not only do the insurance reserves grow on the liability side of the balance sheet but also the investments and cash grow on the asset side of the balance sheet. And because insurance companies also generate a return on these investments, growth in the investments in cash will lead to growth in investment income. So taking a step back from this, hopefully it's clear, that actually when we are modeling a life insurance company it's important that we start with the balance sheet, the insurance reserves, and the investments. As this is what will drive the insurance profits and the investment returns.