Airmic casualty benchmarking survey reveals buyers’ concerns

Instead, buyers’ biggest concerns relate to global compliance with local tax laws and with legal, regulatory and insurance regulations, as well as the need to ensure policies are issued in a timely fashion. These key matters remain unchanged from last year’s survey of buyers.

The Airmic benchmarking survey also found that retentions, liability limits and types of insurance programmes remain broadly very similar to 2010.

Single global programmes continue to be preferred for excess casualty, with 76% choosing this option. Just 13% of companies use separate programmes for the US and the rest of the world, and only 7% of companies purchase their cover locally.

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The survey also found that captive insurance companies continue to be an important source of risk financing. Some 62% of respondents use them in their casualty programmes.

Chartis, which sponsored the survey, noted a contradiction between the economic environment and the insurance strategies employed by many companies. “Very little has changed in the responses of risk managers from last year, despite the many significant events of the year,” said Russell Meagher, Head of Major Accounts at Chartis. “It would suggest that, for some, reacting to economic and legislative changes takes longer than expected—in some cases because of the complexity of the changes, and of cost constraints particularly in the current climate.”

Last year’s casualty benchmarking survey found that respondents identified ‘maintaining compliance with local tax laws’, ‘maintaining compliance with local insurance requirements’ and ‘getting policies issued timely’ as especially significant issues in managing a global casualty programme, while cyber liability was identified as the most significant emerging liability exposure.

In 2010, large companies—those with annual turnover greater than £1bn—were more likely than smaller companies to have a single global casualty programme rather than casualty coverage comprised of two or more regional programmes. It also found that fewer than half of respondents use a captive insurance company for casualty exposures.

Paul Hopkin, Airmic’s Technical Director, said of this year’s survey: “This has been another most interesting and revealing exercise. There’s a wealth of detail in this report for the benefit of insurance buyers. It will be very interesting next year to see how the market has responded to these pressures.”