The world is awash with data, but it's still surprisingly hard to find reliable statistics on what is happening in and around insurance. If you’re creating a business plan, sizing up a market opportunity, creating content or assessing an investment, finding the data to make your case can be hard. Or expensive.
I’ve been building and reviewing business plans for years and come across some great free resources to help me along the way. It was time to catalogue the sources, and having done that I thought I may as well share them with the wider world -- so here they are.
Some of the information is a few years old -- and, as companies increasingly become aware of the value of the data, some of these resources are disappearing behind paywalls. Use with care, but grab the data while you can. Imperfect facts are a better guide to decision making than foggy or fantasy forecasts. I hope some of this data will help you make better decisions -- and convince others to follow your advice.
Health warning: this is quite a long article -- over 2,500 words and lots of links -- if you have a low attention span I suggest skimming until you find something interesting rather than reading every word....
Premium Information
Insurance premium information is one of your data essentials. Understanding how much premium a company is writing, or is being generated by a class of business, is essential for market sizing. If you are building technology or selling data, looking for guidance on how to set prices or on how much your product is worth, then premium is often a good proxy for what you might be able to charge. Using a percentage of premium to figure out what your product may be worth to your buyer is a great sanity check. For example, in my prior life in catastrophe modelling, 1% of reinsurance premium was a good way of validating fees for an individual prospective client. At a country level, it's a good guide as to whether to invest in building models at all.
The most detailed premium information is provided by A.M. Best or S&P, but prices start at around $10,000. If you work for an established insurer or broker, your employer may already be licensing this data, so ask around. Both companies do provide summary and aggregate data to third-party publishers for free, so, if you can’t get the real deal, then the free versions may be enough. I cover these below.
For broad market sizing, try the Insurance Information Institute (III); it has useful headline data, showing for example that U.S. insurance industry net premiums totaled $1.32 trillion in 2019. You will also find the top 10 companies by different insurance sectors here. If you want to go deeper, try the searchable database of the top 100 U.S. insurers at reinsurancene.ws. It has the added benefit of links to recent news about the insurers themselves.
For who is who in global reinsurers, Atlas has a list of the top 50 reinsurers extracted from data published by A.M. Best. Interested in more obscure or specialist data, such as the top 30 insurance companies in Saudi Arabia? Atlas is also a good resource.
Statista is a subscription service but offers a taster dish of free data, such as its pie chart of global P&C premiums by region. A nice added touch is the ability to download the data as a spreadsheet. By the way, keep an eye on Statista's chart of leading insurance brokers, one chart that changes significantly every couple of years as consolidation continues. A Statista license isn’t expensive, but the data is limited compared with what you get from A.M. Best or S&P.
For a U.K. focus, Insurance Post has also just published a comprehensive table of the top 100 U.K. insurers for 2020. The data is behind a paywall, but Insurance Post offers a free trial, so maybe you can try before you buy -- or if libraries open again and you're in London, pop into the City Business Library and get December's print version. NSinsurance has some summary data on the top nine insurance companies in the U.K., which may be sufficient.
Unpicking the maze of the Lloyd’s market is a full-time job in its own right. Lloyd’s publishes some excellent detailed information on each of its 110 syndicates but charges £3,000 to non-members. At one time, this data was also available in business libraries. Atlas has a list of the top 20 syndicates from 2018, which covers those over $600 million annual premium, a good starting point if you are looking for potential clients or wondering who is driving the performance at Lloyd’s.
Comprehensive list by company type
Many of the insurance market associations have full lists of their members. They tend not to have financial metrics, so it's not possible to separate the big from the small, but the lists are useful nonetheless. The MGAA association in the U.K. links to members, as does the American Association of Managing General Agents. Insurance Post published a list of the top 50 brokers in the U.K. in 2016 – there’s quite a bit of consolidation going on in that market, but this is a good starting point. Head over to Insurance Age for the top 100 independent brokers from 2020 by revenue bands. A bit clunky in the way it is presented, but good enough for many purposes. For the U.S., Business Insurance offers you 2018 top U.S. broker firms in a table (no need to squint, click to read).
Insurance coverage
Most of the time, you will want to know what types of insurance different insurers offer. Getting consistent data, by line of business, by premium, by insurer, is hard or impossible without paying for it. In some industry sectors, particularly where there are only a small set of participants, such as marine or cyber, it can be easier to get information. Sometimes you need to come at this sideways, though. Lloyd’s list, for example, provides a list of the top 100 influential people in shipping, so it's possible to extract companies from that. There’s a lot of other free information on that site if you are interested in marine.
If you have good eyesight, the Bank of England’s List of U.K.-authorized insurers is available, as compiled at January 2019. This gives a split by different classes -- albeit at a high level.
Lloyd’s, of course, writes a wide variety of classes of business. You can find out which managing agent writes what business free from the Lloyd’s website. It’s ordered by managing agent, and with about 30 classes in each case requires a bit of data wrangling to figure who does what. If you are wondering who is going to license your cyber tool, for example, then this is not a bad place to start. It's possible to get deeper into the individual Lloyd's managing agents and their syndicates with the report and accounts from Alpha Insurance Analysts. The most current forecast performance of individual syndicates against their business plans is provided by Hampdens.
Insurance spending
To learn how we consumers are spending money, you can drill deeper into insurance spending in the U.K. by downloading the excellent free data from the ABI in Excel – this provides information on average insurance spending, with variation by region, age, coverage type. This is where you will find useful insights such as that the average insurance premium of structure and contents per family, with a head of household age 30 to 50 years old, is £382. Bear that in mind if you are hoping to sell insurers data to improve their underwriting -- or bundle in an IOT sensor. There is not much margin in these numbers to spend on risk selection, pricing or hardware. You'll also find out that in 2018 U.K. insurers wrote £2.7 billion of commercial premium compared with £4.6 billion of domestic insurance premium, and how much they paid out in claims. Fascinating stuff.
Company-by-company level
To really understand what is going on at some point you will want to go deep into the leading insurance companies. S&P or A.M. Best will provide that if you pay. Alternatively, you’ll need to unpick the annual report and accounts. The good news is that these, such as the Aviva annual report, are getting more comprehensive each year as companies are required to provide additional information on regulation and risks. The downside is that also means more work to extract the information you need, and every company report is slightly different so comparing like with like can be difficult.
Country-specific
Munich Re provides some excellent research, with good graphics showing trends and data for countries. This chart is a good example, showing projected premium growth by countries over the next 10 years (and notice that China is forecast to triple in size). Swiss Re through its Sigma research is probably the most comprehensive research into themes and markets with great data and more excellent graphics. Axco provides detailed data on each country, and is well-respected for its research and access in local markets around the world. It is currently offering a free trial of its Market Intelligence database.
Emerging markets and emerging risks
Opportunities for tapping into new markets can open up potential both for insurers looking for new lines and entrepreneurs looking to provide new analytics. The “insurance protection gap” totaled $84 billion in uninsured losses in 2019, according to Swiss Re, so there is a lot of untapped potential. The reason there is a gap, though, is because pricing is tough, aggregation potential is high and premium levels may not reflect the true risk. Five years ago, Allianz forecast cyber premiums of $25 billion by 2020 (from $5 billion at the time), but today they are still lower than $10 billion. In June of last year, A.M. Best published a summary of coverage types, market growth, claims and the top 20 cyber insurers along with information on losses and numbers of policies in force, reproduced here gratis. This article by SpringerLink goes into detail around cyber insurance and is so cheap as to be effectively free.
New industries such as cannabis could hold great potential. According to New Dawn Risk, the legal U.S. cannabis industry would pay about $1 billion in annual premiums if it were insured to levels normal for other businesses, but insurers are generally keeping clear. For a wide range of reports and reliable data on emerging markets, dig around the Geneva Association website.
Funding and acquisitions
We all know that venture funding alone is not the perfect indicator of the quality of a company, but, if you are like me, I’m sure the mega investments get your attention. Investment funding is a good guide as to whether a company can start to pay for your services if you are selling, pay you properly if you are looking for your next job or will be around for a few years if you are a buyer. The go-to source for most companies is Yahoo-owned Crunchbase – much of the information is still free, including funding rounds (where these are disclosed), investors, a handy summary of what the company does and more. Check out, for example, how are our friends at Friss are doing, in the Crunchbase news items, including a link to my recent podcast with CEO Jereon Morrenhof. Be warned, though, that some of the Crunchbase data is out of date or incomplete.
The two best sources I’ve found to track recent funding news, and acquisitions, are the quarterly reviews by FT Partners and the quarterly insurtech reports by Willis (led by Andrew Johnston, my guest on podcast 97). The Willis report is simpler to read but has less information about individual companies. Both are in PDF format. It's good to see a U.K. company leading the field for 2019 Q3 funding (Brit-owned Ki at $500 million) – my podcast with CEO Mark Allan and James Birch of Ki is episode 84 on the Instech London podcast and one of the most popular.
You'll come across various lists of top 100 insurtech companies. Some are of dubious quality (listing companies that have closed is a common indicator of sloppy journalism). Most are useful for identifying what companies do. Don't pay too much attention to the order of the listing; many great companies, particularly those that bootstrap and spend less time marketing, operate below the radar of these listicles.
Insurance rates, up and down
Each of the brokers, Aon, Marsh and Willis, provide its own assessment of the state of the market and how it's changing year to year. Aon Thought Leadership provides a comprehensive library here, and Guy Carpenter offers its Risk Benchmark report.
Other interesting sources
Catastrophe bond issuance is becoming a significant part of the global reinsurance market, with around $100 billion of bonds outstanding. Artemis deal directory provides an excellent directory of all the bonds that have been issued with details of the issuer, size and coverage. If you want a comprehensive view of parametric insurance, and the companies to watch, download our free InsTech London Parametric insurance report. Look out for more of these reports from us in other key areas in 2021, starting with Robin Merttens on e-placing platforms, followed by Mathew Grant (that's me) on location intelligence.
The Cambridge University Risk Centre creates an annual 100 cities risk index, assessing the impact of 24 different natural and man-made hazards. More comprehensive reports are provided on the site for individual areas, such as cyber. The university has strong links with insurance, risk managers in corporations and modelers, and the content is usually excellent. The 2019 report had pandemic as the fourth largest loss, with $49.9 billion GDP at risk.
Coverager used to provide a lot of great free data, but much of it is now available to subscribers only – fair enough, as Shefi and Avi need to get paid for all their great research. There is still some decent information on the website, though, and maybe some of the free content is still in there somewhere. London-based Oxbow Partners do a good job with their annual insurtech 25 companies and have useful data here, but beware of the sell-by date given how fast things change in this space.
By the way, if anyone from VentureScanner is reading this, can you please update your insurance technology map -- the reinsurance category, in particular, is about five years out of date and still lumps in multibillion-dollar global reinsurers with zombie startups. Not all free data is good data.
Going, going, gone…
I suspect we’ll have less choice in a year’s time, so grab this data while you can. This list is far from definitive, so please, if there are any other sources you know. let us all know by adding them in the comments.
Finally, at InsTech London we have over 160 sources of information, currently all still free at www.instech.london with podcasts, interviews, reports and insights. To keep track of what we are discovering each week -- including my weekly "Free Report Worth Reading" and "Other People's Podcasts" -- then sign up here for our hand-crafted newsletter delivered to wherever you are at 7.00am GMT every Wednesday.
