About Our Business

Insurance for insurance companies.

That's a simple way to describe a complex business-a business that plays a significant role in the economies of our and other industrialized nations. We're shock absorbers for our clients. Without insurance, individuals and businesses would find it difficult to recover financially when disaster strikes. Without reinsurance, insurers simply couldn't offer this peace of mind.

Reinsurance helps protect insurers against unforeseen or extraordinary losses by allowing them to spread their risks. For example, a catastrophic fire at an industrial enterprise could financially devastate its insurer. With reinsurance, no single insurer finds itself saddled with a financial burden beyond its ability to pay.

Reinsurance can also help reduce a primary insurer's net liability on individual risks and maintain acceptable financial ratios. Just as a single large fire could cripple the industrial plant's insurer, a large number of relatively small losses could be equally devastating.

Insurance involves pricing a product whose actual cost-losses, in other words-will not be known until sometime in the future. Through reinsurance, insurers can reduce the impact of wide fluctuations in their loss experience, stabilizing the company's overall operating results. And finally, buying reinsurance allows insurers to grow by increasing the insurer's capacity for new business.

Add the impact of social, economic and regulatory environments to this picture and you can see that reinsurance is quite a dynamic business. Now you may be wondering: do reinsurers buy coverage, too? Yes, we do. It's called retrocession.

Just think of it as insurance for reinsurers.