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Bermuda Insurance Report 2008
Business Monitor International, Feb 2008, Pages: 29
The Bermuda Insurance Report provides independent forecasts and competitive intelligence on Bermudas insurance industry.
This report differs from its predecessors in that it includes BMI’s Insurance Business Environment Rating (IBER). The rating brings together a number of pieces of relevant quantitative data, together with BMI’s Country Risk Rating (CRR). It is now much easier to consider the business environment for the insurance sector in any one country relative to the business environment for other industries in that country that are surveyed by BMI, and the business environment for the insurance sector in other countries.
With good reason, Bermuda’s insurance industry describes the island as ‘The World’s Risk Capital’. One of the world’s leaders in property/casualty (re)insurance and offshore captive insurance, the insurance sector writes annual premiums that are well in excess of US$100bn. Total assets at the end of 2005 amounted to around US$330bn.
The key feature of Bermuda is a combination of strengths - the lack of income tax, the first class regulatory regime, the proximity to North America and the development of a sufficiently large community of people with the requisite skills etc. - to give it a position that appears unassailable. Not for nothing does Bermuda account for 40% of the US property catastrophe coverage (among much else) and service well over 1,000 captive insurers. (The actual number of captives is difficult to define because many of these insurers are cell companies that service several different clients simultaneously through Rent-A-Captive programmes.)
Brad Kading, the president of the Association of Bermuda Insurers and Reinsurers (ABIR) notes: ‘The US experience for the last 20 years has been that when there is a US capacity shortfall, in liability lines or in property catastrophe, Bermuda carriers are quickly able to assemble the capital and talent to fill the market gap. No jurisdiction has been as good as Bermuda in getting the needed capital to market quickly so that licensed insurers can assume …business risk.’
The nature of the (re)insurance business is such that there are often (or always) short-term threats from catastrophes, financial market volatility or unfavourable legal/tax changes in major markets (but, in particular, the US). This remains true, notwithstanding the fact that Bermuda’s insurance companies are - after two very good years - in the happy position of having more capital than they need at a time that other global financial institutions have been facing problems. As noted in the above quote, the history of Bermuda’s insurance sector has been one of long-term growth as companies have responded to short-term challenges.
The main problem that the sector faces is a potential lack of suitably skilled personnel. This is true for the (often highly specialised) captive insurance firms as well as the major (re)insurers.
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