Description: In May of 2006 the Life Insurance Mortality and Underwriting Survey Committee of the SOA surveyed both reinsurers and direct companies about their practices with respect to making business decisions in the underwriting process. This article highlights the comparison of the results of the two surveys.

Description: Feature article discussing the impact of health care reform on the direct insurance market and the reinsurance market.

Description: Medical stop-loss reinsurance continues to play a vital role in containing employers’ health care costs. Managing general underwriters [MGUs], who originally handled these programs, have lost market share to large direct writers. This article discusses how health care reform and highly disciplined underwriting tools offer growth opportunities to MGUs.

Description: An update on HMO market trends and reinsurance products, and services supporting them.

Description: An examination of past Flaspohler Survey data to identify drivers of direct writer satisfaction with reinsurers.

Description: The purpose of this article is to discuss some of the challenges insurance companies face when participating in the immediate annuity market for retirement income planning and to suggest ways that reinsurers could be of service to the direct writers of immediate annuities.

Description: Discussion of the evolving role of reinsurance in driving business decisions for the direct side, with particular emphasis on underwriting and risk classification and the emphasis on automatic versus facultative business.

Description: The main purpose of “excess reinsurance” was to enable the direct writer to retain as much face amount as it could justify and merely cede the amounts which it felt was excessive relative to its surplus, earnings or other financial criteria.

Description: Looking at the future, a panel of executives from leading global reinsurers predicted a broader framework in which capital markets, reinsurers and direct writers would be able to provide ways to offer or free up capital.

Description: Insurance companies significantly expanded their use of life reinsurance throughout the late '90s and early '00s. This has meant that volumes being ceded to the reinsurance market have continued to expand after a brief respite in 2001 through quota share opportunities with direct insurers keeping only a portion of their published retention.