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Credit, Surety and Political Risk

The specialised division

Hannover Re has been writing Credit, Surety and Political Risk business for more than twenty years. In 1990, a specialised division was established to meet the specific market and product needs. Our segment has since been considered a core line of business within the group's strategy.

The division has worldwide responsibility for obligatory and facultative reinsurance, maintaining contractual relationships with around 200 clients in more than 50 countries. On the 3rd world market position, we are one of the leading reinsurers in our product segment. Roughly 50% of our premium is related to credit, 40% to surety, and 10% to political risk reinsurance.

All underwriting decisions are taken in the head office in Hannover, supported by our representative offices around the world.

Our portfolio

Since the establishment of our division in 1990, we were able to increase our premium by ten times to the current level of approx. EUR 350m on an underwriting year basis. For more details regarding the structure and development of our portfolio, please see the

Credit, Surety and Political Risk presentation (PDF, 3.74 MB).

As can be seen from the presentation, credit is the dominating product in terms of premium, whereas surety prevails in number of clients and treaties. The structure of the credit market (including export related political risk) is characterised by a high level of concentration resulting in a limited number of global players with large business volumes per reinsurance program. The surety segment is split between numerous small and medium sized market players.

The global groups (offering credit including political risk as well as surety) cover approximately 80% of the world market. In our portfolio, they are represented with around 40%, which allows us to maintain a sound balance between those global players and the large number of smaller clients. Concerning geographical distribution, the European predominance is somewhat exaggeratedly reflected, since the global players place all their worldwide business out of Europe.

The presentation shows that our business segment traditionally is a proportional market. The non-proportional share however is constantly increasing. While its premium is still comparatively small in absolute figures, our non-proportional market share is significantly higher than the proportional.

Regarding the involvement of brokers as opposed to direct placements, we fully respect the individual market practice.