New York

Although property and casualty insurers weathered the global financial crisis better than other types of financial services firms, emotional scars remain—scars that have prompted insurers to hang onto extra capital, an industry expert contends.

V.J. Dowling, managing partner for Dowling & Partners, an institutional investment firm in Hartford, Conn., said the balance sheets of p&c insurers are stronger than ever. “Not a single TARP dollar went to the p&c business,” he said, referring to the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which had the U.S government buying assets and equity from financial institutions to strengthen the sector at the height of the crisis in 2008.

“Any TARP monies went to companies with non-property-casualty businesses,” Mr. Dowling reported. “The p&c business was the last man standing in the crisis,” he said, speaking during an expert panel of industry outsiders at last week's P/C Insurance Joint Industry Forum in New York, explaining that there can be no run on the bank for the biggest item on insurer balance sheets—loss reserve liabilities.

P&C insurers also had better quality assets and less leverage, he said.

Mr. Dowling said, however, that despite the resilience of the p&c industry, a lasting impact of the global financial crisis is “an emotional scar.”

“There are managers of p&c companies who, despite the fact that their balance sheet was rock solid vis à vis others, were seeing a world that was falling apart and asset values that were falling apart,” he said. These manager teams “recognized that if something happened—a big event—they would not be able to raise capital,” he said.

“That recognition still manifests itself today,” he said. While rating agencies believe capital is adequate, the thought-processes of p&c executives have been altered, he said. “They're thinking they need to have a little extra capital in many cases than they might have thought they needed before.”

That has implications going forward for market turns, he concluded.

Mr. Dowling made his remarks during a session titled “Experts Panel: View From the Outside Looking In.” During the session, other panelists—a regulator, a journalist, a consultant and a professor—all agreed with Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute (a co-sponsor of the event), that industry profits are “on the mend.”

Mr. Hartwig said that when the numbers are tallied for 2010, p&c industry performance will be the best since the onset of the global financial crisis.

Leo Grepin, senior partner and p&c insurance practice leader from McKinsey & Company, attributed some of the industry's success to the uncharacteristic willingness to cut expenses earlier than in past periods when profits were waning.

Brian Sullivan, editor of Risk Information, which publishes industry newsletters, pointed to advances in information technology. “That is one of the reasons, we have had a shallower cycle,” he said, noting that companies have a better understanding of where they are. “If they do stupid things, they are aware” of what they need to correct to get loss ratios on track—something that didn't happen during steeper past market cycles, he said.

On a second Forum panel, “View From The Inside Looking Out,” a group of industry chief executive officers was gloomier about the industry outlook for 2011, focusing mainly on “baked-in” low revenue levels that will flow through earned premiums and what else could go wrong in the months ahead.

Among them, Anthony Kuczinski, president and CEO of Munich Reinsurance American in Princeton, N.J., seemed to underscore Mr. Dowling's point about post-crisis wounds. Responding to the question of whether the industry is overcapitalized, Mr. Kuczinski replied that it is not.

“I want to bring you back a little bit to the first quarter of 2009, [when] $90 billion left this industry,” he said, referring to the capital depletion from investment losses.

“There were no major catastrophe events to talk about,” he said, presenting a series of “what-if scenarios,” including the possibility the timing investment losses coincided with the middle of a very active hurricane season. “There would be a lot of [insurance] companies not around today,” Mr. Kuczinski concluded.

“When I think about excess capital, I think in terms of what could be,” he said. As managements, “we're in the risk business, and we need to make sure that we have enough…to respond to those events. It doesn't mean because we haven't had an event that we have excess capacity that we should just throw away.”

“We have a job to do as managements with the capital that we have,” he said.

“We should price [business] appropriately, and if we can't price appropriately, we should save it. If we can't save it, we should give it back to the shareholders [or] parent company, [but] my sense is that we're not overcapitalized.”

Special Reports /

Insurers Clinging To Post-Crisis Capital

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