Reinsurance on the Balance Sheet
- 03:23
Understand how the property and casualty insurance company's balance sheet is presented gross
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Transcript
So, let's take a look at reinsurance assets on the balance sheet. Firstly, let's think about why companies reinsure, or insurance companies reinsure. That's because often they have some specialty, and that specialty in their market probably means that they're generating concentration and that could be a geographical concentration, or it could be an industry concentration. And whenever you've got concentration in insurance that's a bad thing because what you want to do is you want to have the law of large numbers, and you don't want concentration. So, reinsurance allows you to be able to sell some of your risk exposure to the wholesale market to reduce that potential concentration, and this is known as reinsurance. However, the balance sheet that you look at is shown on a hundred percent basis, so even though you have sold some premiums to the reinsurers wholesale market, you will still fully reflect all the liabilities of those premiums on your balance sheet. Now, that also means that therefore you need to reflect that you have a receivable from the reinsurers as an asset because you're holding their liabilities as well. So, if you look here on the right side of the balance sheet, the liabilities and equity, we've got an equity amount of 20 here, but we've got 80 in reserves, of which 10 million we have sold off the exposure to the reinsurers. But we are reflecting not just our reserves, which are 70, but also the reserves related to the reinsured premiums. Now to get the balance sheet to balance, of course, you'd have to make sure that on the asset side, you reflect not just the assets that we've invested in with our share of the reserves, which would be 70 million, but the 10, which represents a receivable that we will get from the reinsurers with which to pay their share of the liabilities. So, you can almost think of this as a balance sheet being gross. Let's look at an example of this kind of grossing up of the balance sheet. So, here what we've got is we've got the asset side of the balance sheet, and you can see here we have a asset which shows how much we should receive from the reinsurers. So, we've handed the cash to them, and they've invested it, but then we have a receivable which means they'll have to pay us back the cash when the liabilities come due. And on the liabilities side, you can see that the total reserves are about £ 12.7 billion, of which 2.271 billion relates to the liabilities that are actually not our exposure, they're the reinsurer's exposure. So, on a net basis we show 10.441 billion. But actually the balance sheet will include the full amount, the 12,712, because on the asset side we have that asset receivable, the 2271. So, we have the receivable on the asset side, and we include the liability on the liability side. Almost like a kind of grossed up balance sheet.