Historical Reserve Analysis
- 02:30
Understand how to model historical reserves
Transcript
So in this case, we've got the disclosure that Direct Line has given its investors from its financial statements. And you can see over a 10 year period, and it's in reverse order to our forecast, we have got the cumulative estimate of claims and then the cumulative payment to date. So in year 10, their total estimate of claims was 3,595. 10 years later, the total payments were 3,474.
So in this case, you can calculate the total estimated payout in year 10 as a percentage of the overall claims was about 96%. In year nine, 97%. Year 8, 96. And you would normally expect to see this decrease, but it looks like there was some divestitures in this business, so it's bounced around a little bit. But if you come down as we get closer to the current year, you can see does drop significantly. And you would normally expect a big chunk of the claims to be paid out in the first year. So what you could do from this is you can do the incremental. So if I just take the 51, minus the prior year, in year one, we had a 51% payout. Then in year two, if I copied this left, it was 19%. Then year three, 7%. Then year four, 5%. And year five, 2%, or just over 2%. And that's the kind of thing that you would normally expect, a slowly declining number. But because it looks like there were some divestitures in this business, you can see it bounces around a bit from year six. And you can see the actual total estimate of claims was much larger, so potentially they divested some of the business. So in many cases, the disclosure is all over the place, and it's really quite difficult to get a handle on the payout pattern, because it's going to depend on the company's book of business. But generally, you would expect it to decline quite fast and then dribble out slowly. And the reason that even though this is a year policy, that you have this long tail, is that if you have a car accident and there's healthcare costs associated with injuries, then often the awards are made for multiple years. So a single year's car insurance policy can actually potentially have a payout tail of maybe 10, in some cases 20 years, because of injuries.