From a societal perspective, flooding is the most common natural hazard. This is true both worldwide and in Canada, where roughly 40 per cent of losses in the Canadian Disaster Database are from floods. From a homeowners (and home insurers)…
Read more →With a little help from Brad Pitt on the way, arguably it was Michael Lewis who first introduced ‘big data’ into the public consciousness with the publication of his book Moneyball more than a decade ago. His account of how a baseball club assembled a competitive and ultimately successful team despite its weak financial situation revealed to a global audience the power of analytical, evidence-based metric approaches in developing winning strategies.
Read more →Hostile takeover bids are comparatively rare and according to the Financial Times the number has fallen to a decade-low, representing under 5% of all M&A activity. The majority of them also fail.
Read more →Though we have to be careful about attributing the rise in disaster losses in the country solely to the poor state of public infrastructure (there are many other factors that have to be considered as well), there can be no…
Read more →As the Swiss Re graph on this page indicates, there is more often than not a wide gap between insured (blue line) and economic – or total – natural disaster losses (red line). Consider the 2013 floods in southern Alberta.…
Read more →The impact of natural catastrophes is having an ever-increasing impact on the results of insurers around the world. According to a recent report from Aon Benfield’s catastophe model development arm, natural catastrophes caused roughly $7 billion in insured losses globally…
Read more →Whenever the subject of overland flood insurance for Canadian homeowners comes up, someone invariably will warn against it by bringing up the spectre of the U.S. National Flood Insurance Program. This is somewhat understandable. Insurance premiums for NFIP coverage are…
Read more →If we as an industry are to have any shot at all of reducing the impact of sewer backup and basement flooding, we have to start cutting through the myths, misinformation, exaggeration, conventional wisdom and everything else that is getting…
Read more →Whenever a large natural hazard event takes place and things didn’t quite go as desired (and they seldom do), you can bet that you will hear from certain quarters that the storm/flood/wildfire/earthquake “was just too big, there was nothing we…
Read more →I received a current SCOR report today that showed the 2013 results of 19 insurance companies representing about $11 billion in written premiums, about 25% of the total in Canada. The interesting thing is that their combined ratio was over…
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