The Risks of Hazard

It’s the Return of the Bill, as the Flood Insurance Market Parity and Modernization Act has been reintroduced to congress with bipartisan support. As every reader of this blog knows, that’s the bill that will help open up the U.S. flood insurance market for insurers, offering property owners options beyond the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) for protection.

All the trade groups are behind it, including Big I, PCI, NAMIC, and others.

But the main reason for excitement is the benefit to society – there remains an enormous Protection Gap on U.S. flood. Every time we read about big floods, one of the statistics is how many damaged homes and buildings were NOT covered for flood – in the Baton Rouge flooding in autumn 2016, it was about 80% of damaged property that was without coverage. Let that sink in…Louisiana (home of some of the most famous floods in history) had only 20% coverage for these floods. It is crazy.

Critics of the NFIP frequently point to its historical deficit ($23B, and counting) as the most damning evidence of its failure. From society’s perspective, it is this lack of coverage for property owners that makes it a failure.

So, the passage of the flood bill is an important first step to fixing this messed up system. But only the first step – ensuring property owners have protection from the very real threat of flooding will be the success that matters. For that to happen, flood insurance needs to become a peril covered by all property insurance.

One way to start the new year is to take a look back and see how the previous year looks now that it’s in the past (which means we’re in the future now, which is neat).

Last Wednesday Fitch released their report on 2017 P&C Underwriting, and it was a pessimistic appraisal. Soft pricing, increased competition, increasing cat losses - sounds bad, doesn’t it?

Did anyone reading the Intelligent Insurer last week notice their Most Read highlights? Here it is from November 15:

I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but they made a perfect microcosm of an interesting and important debate resounding through the corridors of insurance conventions.

Both articles are behind the subscription wall (to which I don’t have a key), but the blurbs illustrate the point brilliantly.

The first article is from an interview with Arno Junke, CEO of Deutsche Rück, and he cautions against becoming “obsessed with developing new products driven by technology and fears of competition from new entrants.”

Meanwhile in the second article, Florence Tondu-Melique - European COO of Hiscox, cautions that “digitally-focused new players in the insurance industry are increasingly threatening the market dominance of traditional insurers in a dynamic that could ultimately force the incumbent players to become nothing more than risk carriers.”

As regular readers of The Risks of Hazard know, this blog focuses on the primary underwriting of cat risk, and the benefits of better underwriting that can be realized by insurers and society at large. Thus, catastrophe bonds are a topic that rarely come up in our discussions. However, the protection gap does (and does and does!). When The Intelligent Insurer published this paragraph-length headline - ILS Leads the Way ... and May Help Closing the Protection Gap - it was inevitable that cat bonds would make their debut in the blog.

Cat bonds, or Insurance Linked Securities (ILS), are far removed from the act of underwriting a cat risk – in fact, they are at opposite ends of insurance. Cat bonds are the final divestment of risk from the insurance industry into capital markets, (unless they bypass insurance completely, as with the MetroCat cat bond), while underwriting is how the risks get into the industry. Granted they are so far apart, how does underwriting relate to cat bonds?