Insurance Industry: The Development of Securitization

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This paper firstly provides a description of the development of securitization in insurance industry. It also introduce the details of securitization process. Meanwhile, the paper displays the reason for the demand of securitization by description of experience in insurance industry. Then it shows how the securitization is applied in insurance industry. What's more, the paper includes the comparison between reinsurance and securitization from three aspects. Finally, it conclude the advantages of securitization.

Introduction

Securitization is one of the most important innovations in financial market. Compared with insurance and reinsurance, securitization always stands on the margin in the past. Even though the insurance industry in USA owned about four trillion dollars in assets with corresponding liabilities and equity capital that could be consideredas alternatives for securitization, securitization were still relatively slow to keep pace with this industry. The securitizationsin insurance industry of the United States were firstly used in 1988. Itinvolved sales of rights to emerging profits from blocks of life insurance policies andannuities(Millette, 2002).

Nevertheless, it developed rapidly because of the huge loss events such as Hurricane Andrew in 1992,World terrorist attacks ofTrade Center in 2001, and Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma in 2005.(Cummins, 2009)Suffering from those disasters, the traditional methods, such as reinsurance, reducing the exposure, and controlling the most volatile part of contractual obligation, are not sufficient enough to transfer the risk (Tynes, 2000). Obviously, the assets of reinsurers were weakened seriously. The common methods of recovering the capacities of r...

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...nes of business, and that shareholders of traditional insurance firms undertake risks and expect earningon their firms’ capital that is corresponded with the level of risk exposures they assumed,securitization, the alternative solution of risk management, is required to be more efficient when the risk managers are willing to hedge risk at lower cost than use traditional insurance ways. Therefore, providing adequate returns to the risk-bearers might be a better way to help with the development of securitization, which will replace the traditional insurance methods. Actually, securitization indeed brings an efficient distribution of risk through both lower costs and increased capacity. Moreover, to keep securitization consecutively attractive to investors, the potential for supplying needed capacity for those uncovered risk exposures should be exploited gradually.

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