Technical reserves in non-life insurance with particular reference to motor insurance

At the ASTIN Colloquium held in Lucerne I reported on the request from the 6th Conference of European Insurance Supervisors for co-operation in the studies being made into the subject of technical reserves in non-life insurance. Copies of notes prepared for the 6th Conference were distributed to members and an advisory committee was formed to assist in dealing with the request. Two reports have been sent to all members of this committee. It has not been practicable to prepare further reports and the present paper sets out the current position of the work being done.2. It will be recalled that in a number of papers I have represented that research into methods of determining technical reserves has been severely restricted because of the absence of suitable statisticson which to experiment. This point has been well taken by the European Insurance Supervisors and recently suitable statistics of motor insurance on which to experiment have been made available on a confidential basis relating to 6 Swedish, 7 German, 5 French, 6 Italian and 4 British companies. These returns, whilst not compiled on a uniform basis, provide an immense amount of data not previously obtainable, and it will be appreciated that the analysis of the data is a task of considerable magnitude.3. I have made certain preliminary studies as a result of which a number of points of detail have arisen which have been referred back for clarification or explanation. Nevertheless these studies have provided a very useful background to the whole problem and the present paper is written against this background and of my earlier papers on the topic. Since the detailed statistics are confidential and agreement for publication would mean some delay, only the broadest indications of numerical values are given. Nevertheless, the comments made are based on the studies of the figures for the 28 companies and thus have a considerable practical utility.