Spotlight Report
  Exchange products seeing slow trading
  GAVIN SOUTER

  03/20/2000
  Business Insurance
  Page 3
  Copyright (C) 2000 Crain Communications, Inc. All rights
  reserved.

  Exchange-based insurance products developed in recent years have
  been somewhat slow to get off the ground.

  Although several exchanges have offered derivative contracts since
  the mid-1990s to cover insurance risks, none so far has posted a
  significant volume of trades.

  Few insurers, reinsurers or policyholders have been drawn away
  from the traditional insurance markets, where capacity remains
  abundant and relatively cheap.

  As long as those traditional markets manage to weather major
  natural catastrophes, the allure of the exchange-based products will
  remain limited, observers say.

  Also stifling the growth of the exchange-based contracts is the
  limited number of contracts available, one expert noted. Dealers, he
  said, are unable to secure a suitable hedge by laying off one
  contract against another.

  Although the various exchanges have had a good opportunity to
  establish a widely used set of new risk financing products, that has
  not been achieved, said Morton Lane, senior managing director,
  capital markets division at Gerling Global Financial Products in
  New York.

  The main problem with the existing exchanges is that they do not
  offer a sufficiently diverse array of products, he said. The only way
  to control the risks in the catastrophe options is to have a diversified
  portfolio of other contracts, and none of the exchanges currently
  offers a sufficiently broad range of options to provide for that
  hedge, he said.

  Florida windstorm options, for example, cannot be bought and then
  hedged in the same way that International Business Machines Corp.
  stock options contracts can be hedged with IBM stock, Mr. Lane
  explained.

  The exchanges might be more attractive to investors if, in addition to
  natural catastrophe options, they included options on other risks, he
  said. Those might include, for example, satellite, aviation and crop
  indexes, Mr. Lane said. "For the insurance buyer, such exchange
  instruments would not represent the perfect risk transfer vehicle, but
  as long as they are quantifiable and indexable, they may represent a
  good surrogate," he said.

  The exchanges could also be used to create a derivatives market for
  over-the-counter securitized deals, if there are regular issuers of
  catastrophe bonds, Mr. Lane said.

  The soft insurance market has also hindered the growth of
  exchange-based insurance products, said Sean F. Mooney, senior
  vp and chief economist at Guy Carpenter & Co., the reinsurance
  brokerage unit of Marsh Inc. in New York.

  "The traditional market has been so competitive that people are not
  looking for other ways of doing business," he said.

  At least in concept, the exchange-based deals are generally similar
  to the mortgage-backed securities that have been a huge success
  since they were introduced in the 1970s. "There is a belief that
  alternative means of transferring risks will grow, but it is difficult to
  predict when," Mr. Mooney said.

  Currently, the trading that is taking place typically involves
  established insurers and reinsurers, so the exchanges have not
  brought substantial new capacity to the marketplace, he said.

  Guy Carpenter provided the index for the Bermuda Commodities
  Exchange reinsurance products. The BCE did not take off,
  however, and was suspended last year after two years of little
  activity.

  The oldest of the insurance-related, exchange-based derivative
  products are the catastrophe options traded on the Chicago Board
  of Trade, which began trading the options in 1996.

  Initially, there was substantial interest in the options, but the soft
  traditional market has hampered use of the contracts to hedge
  catastrophe exposures, said Carlton Purty, an independent broker
  at the CBOT who trades in options.

  No catastrophe option trades have been completed at the CBOT
  so far this year, he said. Last year, there was increased interest in
  the contracts because of Hurricane Floyd, but few contracts were
  traded, Mr. Purty said.

  "I think a major, major catastrophe will have to happen before they
  really take off," he said.

  The contracts offer real protection, and options dealers are keen to
  trade in a new niche, but the conventional insurance and reinsurance
  markets are so soft that few companies are turning to alternative
  coverage options, Mr. Purty said.

  The Catastrophe Risk Exchange, located in Princeton, N.J., has
  radically changed its structure since it was originally announced in
  mid-1996, and it is well positioned to expand, said Frank Sweeney,
  chief operating officer.

  CATEX initially planned to be a computer-based facility for
  reinsurers that would enable them to exchange catastrophe risks
  and to build balanced portfolios.

  But by the time the exchange was operational in November 1996, it
  was clear that most reinsurers and insurers interested in CATEX
  wanted only to buy and sell conventional reinsurance, Mr. Sweeney
  said.

  Although there was some interest in risk swapping, only a handful of
  risks were posted on the system, and none was traded, Mr.
  Sweeney said.

  Consequently, CATEX has become chiefly a "cash for cover"
  exchange, he said, noting that the risks reinsured on the exchange
  include property catastrophe coverage, aviation and liability
  coverages. CATEX also trades industry loss warranties, where
  coverage is triggered by an actual loss combined with an industry
  loss over an agreed threshold.

  Other adjustments to the exchange included making it accessible
  through the Internet in November 1998. And late last year, CATEX
  offered users the ability to set up smaller networks, allowing them
  form groups whose members do business only with one another.

  Since its inception, CATEX has completed about 450 trades,
  totaling $400 million in premium and more than $3 billion in limits,
  he said. CATEX's roughly 160 subscribers include reinsurers,
  insurers and corporate entities that purchase coverage through their
  captives, Mr. Sweeney said.

  "We obviously have a long way to go, but we are pretty satisfied
  with what we have achieved so far," Mr. Sweeney said.

  The exchange sees increased activity after major losses, as cedents
  seek to buy replacement coverage to offset depletions in their
  existing cover, he said. For example, Mr. Sweeney said, there was
  a flurry of activity after the European windstorms in December last
  year.

  Last September, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange entered the field
  of insurance-related derivatives when it began offering weather
  derivatives .

  Thus far, 420 futures contracts have been traded, said Larry
  Grannan, senior director in product marketing at the CME.

  Such contracts are designed to allow businesses to hedge against
  weather-related losses. For example, a utility may sell less power in
  a mild winter, and it would be able to use the futures to hedge a
  resultant fall in revenues.

  The exchange first offered heat-based indexes for Atlanta, Chicago,
  Cincinnati and New York. In January, it added Philadelphia, Dallas,
  Des Moines, Las Vegas, Tucson and Portland, and it began offering
  contracts based on cold weather.

  Currently, most of the trades are between securities dealers
  themselves, but, eventually, the contracts will likely be used more
  extensively by utilities and insurers, Mr. Grannan said.

  In addition, the futures contracts could be used as hedges for
  over-the-counter securitized deals, he said.




Copyright , 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.