Balance Sheet Liabilities
- 02:20
Understand common liability accounts for a property and casualty insurance company
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Transcript
Now let's take a look at the balance sheet liabilities. Here, we've got a typical property and casualty balance sheet. We've got some subordinated liabilities here, which are probably subordinated debt, so that's part of the financing. We've got some other borrowings but, generally, those are going to be pretty small items. The far largest item is the insurance liabilities, which you can see here, which is literally about two thirds of the liabilities. And this relates to all the liabilities that they're exposed to, to the policyholders. So, in other words, this is the estimated claims that they're going to have to pay out to policyholders. That's about 4 billion in this case. But remember, that that is a present value number so it's not the nominal amount that they'll have to pay out. It's today's value of the total estimated future payouts to policyholders. Then in addition, we have got the unearned premium reserve which, in this case, is about 1.5 billion. And this is because when an insurance company writes a policy they will recognize the premium over the policy's life. So, for example, if the policy is written in the middle of the year, let's say June 30th, then by the end of the year, December 31st, they will have earned 50% of that policy. And the remaining amount sits in this line item on the balance sheet, an unearned premium reserve because, of course, if they cancel the policy, then you'd have to return the money back to the policyholder. Then, there's some other items, some trade payables, defer taxes and derivatives, and that makes up the liabilities section of the balance sheet. So we've got the big item, the insurance liabilities which is the present value of all the future estimated claims payments they'll make to policyholders. And even single year policy lines like car insurance, or household insurance can often generate multi-year liabilities. So, for example, if you have a car accident and you have healthcare issues then those payments will have to be continually paid over many years into the future, even though the original insurance policy was for only one year.