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Update on the Major Claims Database

By Dave Matcham, Chief Executive, The International Underwriting Association of London (IUA)

Having worked in close partnership with IUMI Professional Partner, the Boston Consulting Group, we are pleased to announce that at this year’s IUMI annual conference we published, for the very first time, some initial major claims statistics. We were delighted to have been able to do this as following the conference in Toronto last year we were not overly optimistic that we would be in a position to do so.

Since beginning the project in 2018, IUMI has recruited 22 national insurance associations (all IUMI members) who have agreed to submit data on major hull and cargo claims dating back to 2013. To date, IUMI has received 6,800 records of major losses (those over US$ 250,000) totalling US$ 10.2 billion. Cargo underwriting tends to be more evenly spread geographically than hull and so IUMI’s cargo data set is now considered reliable enough to be published. Although data has been collected on a range of metrics, five data fields are considered to be sufficiently robust to be analysed, these are: year of accident, underwriting year, loss amount, type of loss, and mode of transport. The initial findings can be seen in IUMI Stats Report 2002 which is available HERE.

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We were also able to look at the type of loss by accident year and mode of transport both by volume and value. We showed the top five causes, the most common of which were natural catastrophe and fire/explosion. Storage and seaborne represented the two highest transport modes for both volume and value, indeed the more recent years saw the beginnings of a trend of increasing storage losses by either measure.

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IUMI is ideally placed to produce a global major claims database and is working to recruit more national insurance associations to increase the number of claims records contained within the database. It also intends to grow the number of reliable data fields so that further data analysis can take place. Once confidence in the hull data is at a sufficient level, IUMI intends to publish an initial analysis of global hull claims also.

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