Yesterday, Nagarajan Girishankar in one of his posts asked about Indian D&O premium and loss data. And we can get that nowhere. Even the broader classification is named as Public/Product Liability. Creating a doubt whether insurers report all Liability and Financial lines data or only in respect of Public/Product Liability/CGL data. Even in that data, we cannot know what is paid claims and what is IBNR/IBNER?
If we talk of Deep-water Horizon blowout, BP settlements were:
USD 10 billion to individuals and businesses
USD 30 billion for cleanup costs and legal compensation
USD 20 billion for pollution and natural resource damage.
If we talk of Events like WTC attack, we know that the total insured losses were USD 26 billion. And Hurricane Katrina, total insured losses were USD 82 billion.
Let’s talk of India. What was the insured loss in Satyam? What was the loss paid in Vizag gas leak in which many people died? What was the total insured loss in Chennai floods or 2015 or Mumbai floods of 2005? What was the total insured loss of 26/11 terrorist attack in Mumbai? What was the total insured losses in various cyber-attacks in recent times on various pharma companies or real-estate companies? What was the total insured loss in a large fire in a battery manufacturer plant in south India? What was the total insured loss in the train accident in Odisha in which around 300 people died?
We have no answers to any of these questions? And we want the buyers to trust us that we pay large claims just because we keep repeating that we paid in covid more claims than the total health insurance premium we collected. This is the only statement related to claims paid the Indian insurance industry has ever published.
How does any proper research happen if data is not available. Normally, Data transparency improves with time. In 1990’s, I had complete data of each and every large risk loss and event losses in India (including names of clients) because, GIC annual reports contained that,
Sad-today, we can get no data. We need to ponder.
