Claims Expense and Reserves
- 02:25
Understand how the claims or loss reserve is calculated and the interaction between the income statement and the balance sheet
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Transcript
So to recap on Aviva's reserve table. The top triangle represents the payments of the claims expense over time. And you can see as time goes on, the total payment increases. The second triangle shows us how the claims, the total claims estimate will potentially change as time goes on, as we get a more accurate picture of what those claims look like. Not by a significant amount, but it will change according to how accurate the original estimate was. And then finally, the 11,525 number is the total amount of claims that are still unpaid, which, of course, is also matched on the balance sheet by an asset which will typically be invested in financial securities. Let's take a look at the comparison between the income statement and the balance sheet. In this income statement, we have got earned premiums of 3,089.5. We have an investment return, coming from the assets on the balance sheet, of 154.6 million. And then the total estimated claims that we expect to pay out of those premiums that have been written in this year is 1,966.9.
So we wrote premiums of 3,089. Of that, we expect to pay out 1,966.9 over time.
On the balance sheet what we have is we have a liability representing these claims that are expected to be paid out in the future, and that is 4,005.9. Compare that to the claims expense number on the income statement of 1,966.9. The reason the claims expense on the income statement is so much smaller is that the insurance liabilities on the balance sheet don't just relate to one year, but they've been built up by many years of insurance claims expense. So the 4,005.9 represent multiple years of claims expense that are still waiting to be paid out. So the balance sheet number is gonna be larger than the claims expense on the income statement because the balance sheet number represents multi-year claims expense.