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Hamilton, Bermuda. (Photo: Andrew F. Kazmierski/Shutterstock)

Life Health > Annuities

Bermuda Offshoring Could Make Annuity Issuers Look Too Good: Moody’s

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What You Need to Know

  • Bermuda meets the global Solvency II standards and is upgrading its rules.
  • Using offshore reinsurance can help a U.S. life insurer reduce the amount of capital needed to support a given amount of business.
  • The U.S. insurer may also be able to invest its capital in higher-risk asset classes.

Some U.S. life insurers use reinsurance from providers based in Bermuda and other offshore jurisdictions to cut the amount of capital supporting their products, invest the capital more aggressively and come away with nicer-looking risk-based capital ratios, according to a team at Moody’s Investors Service.

Bob Garofalo and other analysts at Moody’s have prepared a new report, backed with a close look at the regulations in Bermuda and other offshore jurisdictions, and detailed financial figures, to address a concern that insurance agents, regulators and others have been talking about for several years: whether the flurry of announcements about life insurers working with offshore reinsurers, and setting up their own offshore reinsurers, is something to worry about.

The Moody’s analysts answer: Sure.

“There are valid reasons for conducting reinsurance business offshore; each insurer has its own motivations for doing so,” the analysts say.

But “the overall movement of business offshore is a credit negative for the life insurance sector, because this business provides less transparency for investors and is generally subject to less regulation than business that resides onshore in U.S.-regulated entities,” the analysts warn. “Furthermore, offshore entities tend to hold less capital than onshore entities.”

What It Means

Analysts at Moody’s think you should consider whether the companies that provide your clients’ life insurance polices and annuities have used offshore reinsurance to cast their finances in a flattering light.

Moody’s Ratings

Moody’s is one of the United States’ nationally recognized statistical rating organizations —credit rating agencies that U.S. companies can use to meet requirements set by the Securities and Exchange Commission and other federal regulators.

Its ratings have a direct effect on whether companies can borrow money, how much they pay to borrow money, whether they can write insurance that comes with long-term guarantees and how much they can charge for products like life insurance policies and annuities.

The new offshore reinsurance report, which was published behind a login wall, is not a credit rating action, but it reflects the thinking that could go into future rating actions at Moody’s and other rating agencies.

Offshore Life Reinsurance Background

Reinsurance is a form of insurance for insurance companies. A U.S. life insurer may use reinsurance either to protect itself from catastrophic risk or to transform the structure of the risk, by, for example, putting another company in charge of handling unwanted blocks of life insurance or annuity business.

If a life insurer “cedes,” or sends, some of the business it wrote to a reinsurer, and the reinsurer fails, the life insurer must “recapture” the business that was ceded, or take it back.

U.S. life insurers have ceded life and annuity business backed by about $800 billion in reserves to offshore reinsurers since 2017, and Bermuda-based reinsurers handle 83% of the offshore reinsured business, according to the Moody’s analysts.

Companies backed by private equity firms have arranged many of the reinsurance deals.

Traditional life insurers have also organized many of the deals.

Reinsurers based in the Cayman Islands and Barbados handle 11% of the ceded business, and reinsurers based in Switzerland and Ireland handle another 5% of the ceded business.

Most of the large (re)insurers have their own offshore companies that include operations in Bermuda,” the Moody’s analysts write.

Why Bermuda?

Moody’s analysts note that Bermuda has lower taxes and well-developed regulatory requirements, and that the Bermuda Monetary Authority has adopted the internationally accepted Solvency II insurance regulation framework.

Bermuda has proposed regulatory updates, set to take effect in January 2024, that would make its rules more strict.

But the analysts add that Bermuda gives insurers and reinsurers flexibility that could be helpful to companies using the flexibility for valid reasons and concerning if used by other companies.

  • Bermuda has lower capital requirements.
  • Bermuda lets insurers and reinsurers assume that they will earn relatively high returns on “alternative assets,” or assets that come with higher levels of investment risk and higher returns than the investment-grade bonds that typically make up a large majority of a U.S. life insurer’s investment portfolio.
  • Bermuda puts fewer restrictions on insurers’ and reinsurers use of higher-risk investments, and it does not penalize insurers and reinsurers for investing capital in riskier classes of assets, the way U.S. insurance regulators’ risk-based capital ratio, or RBC ratio, does.

Many of the new offshore reinsurance arrangements make use of “sidecars,” or mechanisms that let the life insurers and reinsurers share the risks and profits associated with a block of life or annuity business with outside investors.

The sidecars may increase the supply of capital available to support life and annuity business, but they can also increase the risk that a reinsurance arrangement will fail and force the original writer of the business to take it back at a bad time, the Moody’s analysts say.

An Annuity Specialist’s View

Michelle Richter-Gordon, co-founder of Annuity Research & Consulting, a firm that helps retirement plan fiduciaries use in-plan annuities, welcomed the release of Moody’s report.

“We are finally seeing a major rating agency acknowledge what experts have been raising alarm bells about to the NAIC and to the U.S. Department of Labor for a few years now,” Richter-Gordon said.

Many of the reinsurance deals, including many started by insurers owned by private equity firms, look as if they involve relatively low capital levels, she added.

In some cases, the deals may seem small when compared with the overall size of the insurers involved, but Gordon-Richter fears that some of the insurers have such narrow capital surplus cushions that even modest asset losses could lead to insolvency.

Hamilton, Bermuda. (Image: Andrew F. Kazmierski/Shuttertock)


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