Trust, but check

What should a person be convinced by buying an insurance policy? Firstly, that the insurer will not deceive him, secondly, that the company will not go bankrupt, thirdly, that he himself paid for insurance no more than a neighbor. To make the right choice, you need to know about the insurance company as much as possible, imagine its financial situation and how reasonable tariffs it offers.

In the West, you can not bother yourself with long conversations with the employee of the insurance company. Everything is simple there: every self -respecting economic magazine publishes the ratings of insurance companies prepared by famous agencies. Therefore, it is enough to choose the company more carefully, find the number of her phone in the directory and ask to send an insurance agent.

Russian citizens are more difficult. There are very few ratings, they are selective and do not take into account many factors, so you can judge by the merits of the insurance company very approximately. You have to go there and ask questions. Moreover, the first impression of communication with insurers is no less important than the information that you will draw from the conversation.

If you answer questions about the authorized capital, shareholders and investments in confusing and reluctant, they often mention the “commercial secret”, and the request to show the last balance causes irritation, this should be alarming. In principle, a commercial secret can only be information about specific agreements with specific persons. So an attempt to conceal from a potential client financial indicators an occasion for suspicion.

In order to evaluate the financial reliability of insurers, experts must analyze the economic conditions in which the company works, the structure of capital, the management system and the strategy of its development, the quality of the investment portfolio, reinsurance activities and so on.

Potential non-specialist clients can be advised to pay attention to the size of their own funds of the company, insurance reserves, the volume of bonuses and payments, the structure of the insurance portfolio. The more the company's own funds, the better. In the balance sheet, they are reflected in several lines, but, as a rule, the most significant indicator is the authorized capital. If it is several million dollars, a large company is in front of you. Big capital is a sign that it can independently take considerable risks for insurance. In addition, if necessary, the insurer will meet its own capital under insurance contracts. However, this does not mean that a small company cannot be reliable.

Company insurance reserves are directly related to the volume of their operations. In the language of economists, reserves are accounts payable to the insurer to customers.

Another point that is worth paying attention to is the structure of the insurance portfolio. There are operations less and more unprofitable. For example, car insurance is a rather unprofitable case, since the amounts of payments can often approach the amount of premiums. If there are a lot of unprofitable operations, the company may well turn out to be a financial pyramid.

Reinsurance is something without which the insurance business cannot do. For example, the management of a large enterprise like AZLK wants to insure fixed assets. Their cost is calculated by tens of millions of dollars, so the risk for the insurance company is huge. At the same time, by law, an insurance company cannot take on a risk exceeding 10 percent of its own funds (in practice, the companies try to ensure that this percentage is even less). So firms that can alone insure a large plant, practically do not exist.

Accordingly, all significant risks of this kind have to be distributed between dozens, and sometimes hundreds of insurance and reinsurance organizations. That is, the case of any troubles each company will make insurance payments in proportion to the rating of risk.

If we are talking about insurance of a particularly large and expensive object, the case is not limited to the limits of one state. When insurance of such objects, most of the risk, as a rule, is reinsured abroad. In general, how well the reinsurance protection system is built in the company, its financial stability depends very much.

The cost of the policy takes into account mathematical, economic, statistical and probabilistic factors. A fire, for example, happens more often than a flood, so insured against fire is more expensive. It is more expensive to insure him to insure the “nine” (it is stolen more often) than the “six”, and the young man will pay less for the medical insurance policy than the old man. Naturally, the commission that insurance agents receive and the expenses of the company itself for conducting the case is added to the “price” of the risk.

Of course, the client always wants to save and buy a cheaper policy. In an effort to attract as many customers as possible, companies try to reduce costs and offer a lower tariff. To do this, they resort to reinsurance, improve business, optimize investment policy. Some insurers in the fight for the client resort to dumping - they greatly underestimate tariffs, which sooner or later inevitably affects the reliability of the company, especially if the sales of “cheap” policies are significant. So the pursuit of cheapness is a dangerous thing as always. Sergey Belousov