Posted in News on 03 Sep 2019
Casualty State of the Market London Update September 2019
Since our SOTM release in February this year, there has been a continued hardening of conditions, as carriers push for rate increases beyond the transportation and habitational industries and across the casualty sector as a whole.
This is even on clean business or accounts that have been historically under-priced, as carriers seek to apply corrective action and this has accelerated through the second half of the year.
There is also continued capacity withdrawal or line management for US utility and wildfire exposed risks and in the mid-stream energy and mining sectors. As a result, even higher rate increases are being imposed by renewing carriers or new “opportunist” capacity, taking advantage of the times.
A major contributor of these conditions in the general liability space is loss emergence from prior years which is worse than expected and this is due to the notable increase in the size of jury awards - in 2018 the 100 largest US jury verdicts ranged from US$22m to US$4.6 billion. [1]
The advice from the London Casualty Team for renewing and new business proposal is to submit presentations well ahead of their anniversary date and engage with your Broker and underwriters to manage expectations.
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