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September 19, 2011 at 08:00 PM
Few industries are as data-driven and introspective as the life and health insurance business, which is why National Underwriter is proud to present its annual 200 Industry Leaders report. What follows are charts showing the top 200 companies in 14 different segments spanning the life, health and financial aspects of this industry.
These charts would have been impossible to compile were it not for the help of Highline Data, a sister company to National Underwriter. Highline delivers financial information on the insurance carrier community for use in areas like financial benchmarking, competitive analysis, market entry/exit decision-making, industry aggregates and industry market share analysis. The information is derived from the NAIC filings database, as well as publicly available financial statements provided by the companies themselves.
According to F. Reilly Cobb, vice president of Highline, this information is widely used by the industry itself, but it is also used by the rest of the institutional financial management community to assess whether to lend or market securities to insurers.
“The insurance industry as a whole, but especially the life insurance industry, is a huge consumer of fixed income securities,” Cobb says. “So there is a whole set of financial institutions involved in the manufacture and distribution of such securities who are highly interested in the kind of information Highline provides.”
In addition to broad surveys such as the charts published on the following pages, Highline can also schedule specific reports, such as the portfolios of a particular company, or a list of reinsurance transactions between carriers. But with so much data, especially from carriers that are divided between multiple operating companies, context remains key. Thus, Highline also offers a team of analysts who can help clients make sense of company filings and gain access to specific elements of it.
There are many many levels on which this can be made useful,” Cobb says. “Our challenge is to make people understand how much data there is available, what it all means and how to sift out the information that answers their individual questions.”
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