New IRMI Information in Your SilverPlume Library:

September 2006

Four reference manual updates as well as new issues of The Risk Report and Captive Insurance Company Reports (CICR) have been added to the IRMI infobases.

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Newsletters & Journals

In response to requests from subscribers, we are now making an Adobe Acrobat version (PDF file) of the current issue of each of our newsletters available each month. This will allow you to quickly and easily print an attractive copy to toss in your briefcase and read at your leisure.

The September issue of The Risk Report is our annual insurance market report. With help from their many contacts in the field, IRMI research analysts provide a line-by-line commentary on the status of the insurance market today, what markets are still players, and what the future may hold for renewals. Property insurance is the primary area of concern this year, with a very difficult and distressed marketplace for accounts with significant catastrophe loss exposures. General liability, excess liability, products liability, and surety have also stabilized. However, there are a number of exceptions with respect to certain industries and certain lines of coverage.

The lead article of Captive Insurance Company Reports (CICR),"Cell Captives for Structured Insurance," was written by Donald Riggin of Albert Risk Management Consultants. After explaining the basics of cell captives, he shifts his attention to structured insurance and how some cell captive owners use their facilities to write this business. Structured insurance (despite its recent negative publicity) is still a valuable tool when conventional insurance is either unavailable or significantly overpriced, and yet an organization still needs insurance to satisfy terms of a contract or satisfy a regulatory requirement. The article contrasts conventional cell captives to structured cell captives, particularly focusing on retention limits, actuarially derived expected losses, aggregate limits, types of lines of business that can be written, risk sharing issues, tax deductibility, needs for a front and FAS 113 implications. "Diversify Risks with Employee Benefits" written by James Stewart and John Thomson of Towers Perrin, addresses how to quantify the impact of adding employee benefits into a captive, and provides a framework for accessing the impact. Employee benefits can diversify a captive's risks. They recommend using claims ratios and risk ratios to support this. "The Best of Times; the Worst of Times" is a case study written by Hugh Rosenbaum. It shows how a captive dealt with its parent's changes in both good times and bad, as its parent went through enormous changes.

Reference Manuals

Commercial Auto Insurance is dedicated to the subject of uninsured/underinsured motorists coverages. Both the general discussion and all but six (i.e., Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Puerto Rico, and Texas), of the state-specific uninsured and underinsured motorists pages are revised in this supplement.

Commercial Liability Insurance substantially revises section X--Umbrella/Excess Liability. This is the beginning of a major overhaul of our treatment of umbrella insurance, arguably the most important policy that any entity purchases. This first installment looks at a myriad of issues, such as insuring agreements, exclusions, drop down, defense coverage, and insured provisions. Our analysis is now backed with more than 300 legal citations.

Commercial Property Insurance updates several discussions in the inland marine section: the overview of all the forms in the AAIS and ISO filed inland marine coverage programs, plus the discussions of accounts receivable and valuable papers coverage. It also provides updates to the crime section of the manual: a discussion of current AAIS commercial crime program, plus specimen copies of the 2006 editions of key ISO commercial crime forms (CR 00 20 06 06 and CR 00 21 05 06) are provided.

Personal Risk Management and Insurance updates the analysis of dwelling property coverage to reflect the new ISO forms. It also includes revisions of the ISO PAP and homeowners endorsement lists and updates several UM/UIM coverage state pages, certain parts of the general UM/UIM discussion, and two no-fault (MI and TX) state pages.

New Manual Added

Practical Risk Management is the risk professional's indispensable source of practical, concise, action-oriented background and advice on all of the most important activities, techniques, and tools of risk management. Learn more about this publication...

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