Profit =
earned premium + investment income - incurred loss - underwriting
expenses.
Insurers
make money in two ways: (1) through underwriting, the process by
which insurers select the risks to insure and decide how much in
premiums to charge for accepting those risks and (2) by investing
the premiums they collect from insureds.
The most
complicated aspect of the insurance business is the underwriting of
policies. Using a wide assortment of data, insurers predict the
likelihood that a claim will be made against their policies and
price products accordingly. To this end, insurers use actuarial
science to quantify the risks they are willing to assume and the
premium they will charge to assume them. Data is analyzed to fairly
accurately project the rate of future claims based on a given risk.
Actuarial science uses statistics and probability to analyze the
risks associated with the range of perils covered, and these
scientific principles are used to determine an insurer's overall
exposure. Upon termination of a given policy, the amount of premium
collected and the investment gains thereon minus the amount paid
out in claims is the insurer's underwriting profit on that policy.
Of course, from the insurer's perspective, some policies are
winners (i.e., the insurer pays out less in claims and expenses
than it receives in premiums and investment income) and some are
losers (i.e., the insurer pays out more in claims and expenses than
it receives in premiums and investment income).
An insurer's
underwriting performance is measured in its combined ratio. The
loss ratio (incurred losses and loss-adjustment expenses divided by
net earned premium) is added to the expense ratio (underwriting
expenses divided by net premium written) to determine the company's
combined ratio. The combined ratio is a reflection of the company's
overall underwriting profitability. A combined ratio of less than
100 percent indicates underwriting profitability, while anything
over 100 indicates an underwriting loss.
Insurance
companies also earn investment profits on “float”. “Float” or
available reserve is the amount of money, at hand at any given
moment, that an insurer has collected in insurance premiums but has
not been paid out in claims. Insurers start investing insurance
premiums as soon as they are collected and continue to earn
interest on them until claims are paid out.
In the
United States, the underwriting loss of property and casualty
insurance companies was $142.3 billion in the five years ending
2003. But overall profit for the same period was $68.4 billion, as
the result of float. Some insurance industry insiders, most notably
Hank Greenberg, do not believe that it is forever possible to
sustain a profit from float without an underwriting profit as well,
but this opinion is not universally held. Naturally, the “float”
method is difficult to carry out in an economically depressed
period. Bear markets do cause insurers to shift away from
investments and to toughen up their underwriting standards. So a
poor economy generally means high insurance premiums. This tendency
to swing between profitable and unprofitable periods over time is
commonly known as the "underwriting" or insurance cycle.
Property and
casualty insurers currently make the most money from their auto
insurance line of business. Generally better statistics are
available on auto losses and underwriting on this line of business
has benefited greatly from advances in computing. Additionally,
property losses in the US, due to natural catastrophes, have
exacerbated this trend.
Finally,
claims and loss handling is the materialized utility of insurance.
In managing the claims-handling function, insurers seek to balance
the elements of customer satisfaction, administrative handling
expenses, and claims overpayment leakages. As part of this
balancing act, fraudulent insurance practices are a major business
risk that must be managed and overcome.