Reinsurance companies offer insurance to other insurers in case the original insurer does not have enough money to pay claims. Here's a look at the two types available.
Chip Stapleton is a Series 7 and Series 66 license holder, CFA Level 1 exam holder, and currently holds a Life, Accident, and Health License in Indiana. He has 8 years experience in finance, from financial planning and wealth management to corporate finance and FP&A.
Facultative reinsurance and reinsurance treaties are two types of reinsurance contracts. When it comes to facultative reinsurance, the main insurer covers one risk or a series of risks held in its own books. Treaty reinsurance, on the other hand, is insurance purchased by an insurer from another company. With facultative reinsurance, the reinsurer can review the risks involved in an insurance policy and either accept or reject them. But the reinsurer in a treaty reinsurance policy, on the other hand, generally accepts all the risks involved with certain policies.
Facultative reinsurance is reinsurance purchased by an insurer for a single risk or a defined package of risks. Usually a one-off transaction, it occurs whenever the reinsurance company insists on performing its own underwriting for some or all the policies to be reinsured. Under these agreements, each facultatively underwritten policy is considered a single transaction, not lumped together by class. Such reinsurance contracts are usually less attractive to the ceding company, which may be forced to retain only the riskiest policies.
Suppose a standard insurance provider issues a policy on major commercial real estate, such as a large corporate office building. The policy is written for $35 million, meaning the original insurer faces a potential $35 million in liability if the building is badly damaged. But the insurer believes it cannot afford to pay out more than $25 million. So before even agreeing to issue the policy, the insurer must look for facultative reinsurance and try the market until it gets takers for the remaining $10 million. The insurer might get pieces of the $10 million from 10 different reinsurers. But without that, it cannot agree to issue the policy. Once it has the agreement from the companies to cover the $10 million and is confident it can potentially cover the full amount should a claim come in, it can issue the policy.
Treaty reinsurance occurs whenever the ceding company agrees to cede all risks within a specific class of insurance policies to the reinsurance company. In turn, the reinsurance company agrees to indemnify the ceding company of all risks therein, even though the reinsurance company has not performed individual underwriting for each policy. The reinsurance often applies even to those policies that have not yet been written, so long as they pertain to the pre-agreed class.
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