Scor’s specialty rates up 23%, with further hardening predicted
French reinsurer Scor SE achieved average rate increases of 23% in its specialty insurance business last year, with average rates up 7.8% at Jan. 1 treaty reinsurance renewals.
Scor said it continues to benefit from the hard insurance market with a “strong rate-on-rate compounding effect” on large industrial and commercial single risks. Rates are rising in short-tail lines particularly, it added.
The company’s specialty insurance book grew by 16% last year compared with 2019, with price improvements “broadening globally and across all business lines.” Scor said it will actively steer its risk portfolio toward the most attractive market conditions this year.
Despite many observers noting that the Jan. 1 reinsurance renewals were less difficult for insurers than expected, Scor said it secured price increases and improved terms and conditions across all lines of business and regions.
This helped grow its treaty reinsurance premium by 15.9% at constant exchange rates, to €3.45 billion ($4.17 billion).
Scor said it was able to get preferential terms with many of its key clients and benefited from a generalized tightening of terms and conditions, including the introduction of contagious disease exclusions on short-tail lines and selected long-tail lines.
Scor expects the current hardening market trends to continue in upcoming 2021 and 2022 renewals.
Jean-Paul Conoscente, CEO of Scor Global P&C, said: “The January 2021 renewals have shown a significant acceleration of market hardening for P&C reinsurance. In this supportive market environment, we fully leveraged our positioning and deep client relationships to achieve strong profitable growth, marked by a sizeable improvement of the profitability of our book across all regions and lines. Looking forward to future renewals, we are confident that price increases and improvements in terms and conditions will continue.”
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