Combined Ratio Over Time
- 03:57
Understand how the combined ratio changes over time
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So what happens to the combined ratio over time? Let's take a look at an example. In this case, we've got five years of a company's combined ratio, and the top section of the bar is the claims expense. So you can see it's moved from 59.6% to 61.8%. Lower down the bar you can see you've actually got two components. One is the commission expense, which is the small purple section. So in the latest year, 2018 the commissions were 6.5% of premiums. And then the general expenses in the business and the latest year, 2018 is 23.4%. Now, usually those two things will get aggregated together in the total expense ratio, but you can see in every single year in the last five years the overall combined ratio is less than 100%, which suggests that this company is making an underwriting profit in every single year. This is relatively unusual for companies to make underwriting profits continuously. Normally what we would expect for most insurance companies, not all, but most, that the combined ratio is usually close to around 100% over time. However, the combined ratio often follows a cycle. And you can see here we've got the combined ratio over a number of years. On the left axis, you can see it is a percentage. So the three companies direct line, RSA and Admiral, you can see the combined ratio moving. And certainly for Admiral, it is a significant move. So in 2007 and 2008, you can see the combined ratio was significantly above 100%, which means that the company would be making underwriting losses. And then what happens, the combined ratio goes down to just below 100% in 2013 and 2014. Now, they're good reasons for this and often this is driven by the repricing of the insurance. And what that means is for the same risk you may get more or less premium. And that's typically driven by the kind of returns you can get for investing those premiums between receiving them from the customer and paying them out to claimants. So when the returns on investing the premiums are very high, you can often weather underwriting losses, because they're subsidized by the investment return. In other situations where the investment return falls, that means you can't afford to subsidize any underwriting losses, and that means you'll start to have to charge more for ensuring the same type of risks. And that's probably what's happening with Admiral in the 2007 year is when the returns are very high. And then we had the recession in 2008, so the insurance gets repriced, in other words, the insurance companies start to charge more for the same risk and the combined ratio starts to fall. It is also affected by things like the correct pricing of the risks, in other words, was the claim estimate correct, and also the efficiency of the firms. And the more efficient you are, the lower your expense ratio and potentially the lower your combined ratio, too. So there are a number of moving factors here, but in most companies in property and casualty you will see the combined ratio move in a kind of cyclical nature affected by the returns that you'll get from investing the premiums.