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Pool Re insures nondamage business interruption risks

Posted On: Jul. 8, 2019 8:09 AM CST

Business interruption

Pool Reinsurance Co. Ltd., the U.K. government-backed terrorism reinsurance backstop, has placed a new retrocession program covering nondamage business interruption losses with a limit of £40 million ($50.1 million), effective Friday.

The cover, which sits excess of both a £15 million placement attachment and member retentions, was placed by Guy Carpenter & Co. LLC with Liberty Specialty Markets as the lead market and Munich Reinsurance Co. and Axa XL , a unit of Axa SA, also participating, Pool Re said Monday in a statement. Cover is back to back with that provided by Pool Re to its members and is focused primarily on nondamage denial of access caused by a terrorist attack.

The Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill 2018, which was signed in February, allows Pool Re to cover losses incurred if a business cannot trade or is prevented from accessing its premises in the wake of a terrorist attack that does not involve damage.

“This is the culmination of our longstanding efforts to both enable Pool Re to cover nondamage business interruption and to return as much of the risk to the private market as possible,” Steve Coates, chief underwriting officer at Pool Re, said in a statement. “Our actuarial team, in collaboration with Guy Carpenter and counter-terrorism specialists, developed an in-house model for NDBI, which allows both us and our reinsurers, to quantify and evaluate the risk.”

In March, Pool Reinsurance announced it secured a £2.3 billion retrocession program on a three-year basis, led by Munich Re, and put £10 million into an information-sharing platform in a joint project with the UK National Counter-Terrorism Police HQ and the Home Office’s Joint Security & Resilience Centre.

Pool Re was set up in 1993 by the U.K. government and insurance industry and its members include most insurers and Lloyd’s of London syndicates that offer commercial property insurance in the United Kingdom. In 2015, the mutual insurer implemented a series of changes to modernize the pool.