{"id":1954,"date":"2026-05-12T11:30:33","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T11:30:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ateliersfurrer.com\/?p=1954"},"modified":"2026-05-12T13:38:03","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T13:38:03","slug":"munich-re-cfo-confident-on-handling-potential-claims-inflation-from-iran-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ateliersfurrer.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/12\/munich-re-cfo-confident-on-handling-potential-claims-inflation-from-iran-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Munich Re CFO confident on handling potential claims inflation from Iran war"},"content":{"rendered":"

After Munich Re, one of the world\u2019s largest reinsurance companies, revealed IBNR reserves of \u20ac90 million related to the ongoing conflict in Iran, the company\u2019s CFO, Andrew Buchanan, described the figure as cautious as he highlighted Munich Re\u2019s three lines of defence.<\/p>\n

\"\"In its results announcement<\/a> early this morning, Munich Re reported that the \u20ac90 million for claims arising from the Iran war is split \u20ac60 million in Global Special Insurance and \u20ac30 million in property and casualty reinsurance.<\/p>\n

During a recent call with analysts, CFO Buchanan was questioned on whether the \u20ac90 million is specific notification, and also on the potential second order inflation impact and if there\u2019s any proactivity around that.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have little to no notifications. And so, the \u20ac90 million represents IBNR, \u201d said the CFO. \u201cWe also consider the \u20ac90 million to be somewhat cautious, but somewhat cautious as an estimate of direct losses that might arise as a result of insureds or cedents being able to claim directly on the primary insurance or the reinsurance that we have with them. So, we\u2019re positioning the \u20ac90 million in a more narrow sense. It\u2019s literally claims that we might end up paying if, for example, there are claims coming through the marine war markets or the political violence and terrorism market, that kind of thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Buchanan emphasised that the \u20ac90 million is a conservative, narrowly defined number, which doesn\u2019t also include some kind of blanket allowance for inflation.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Pelagos<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t consider that to be necessary at this stage, not because we\u2019re denying that inflation could be higher than expected, but I actually think we\u2019ve lived through an experience in 2022 that I think will probably turn out to be more severe than what we\u2019re seeing this year, and where our processes and our financial management approach, I think, came through very well and proved to be effective,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The CFO went on to highlight Munich Re\u2019s three lines of defence, the first of which is that most of the company\u2019s business can be repriced within one year. \u201cAnd as you\u2019d expect, our pricing people and our economists are looking carefully at what that needs to be,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Adding: \u201cThe second line of defence is asset liability management, where a meaningful part of our asset portfolio is responsive to inflation in some way. And I mentioned in my prepared comments, we do expect a bit of a catch up effect on our inflation linked bonds in Q2 as the most recent CPI numbers kick in there.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then the third line of defence is reserves\u2026 But there, I would have to say we, in part of our annual reserve review, have a reserve risk heat map where we think carefully about all of the white swans, black swans, and other swans that could go wrong. And there\u2019s a whole, let\u2019s say bucket that is broadly allocated to economic deviations or volatility, and part of that is inflation.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd so, at the moment, I\u2019m pretty comfortable that whatever inflation brings on the claims side we can certainly digest. And so, we didn\u2019t feel the need in Q1 to do some kind of opportunistic special booking.\u201d<\/p>\n

The CFO also took questions from the media today, and was asked a similar question around inflation related to the Iran war.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe look at all the things that could go wrong, and we do also then have general provisions for things like adverse economic fluctuations, which is things like inflation. And I\u2019m comfortable that what we have in our reserve buffers allocated to scenarios like that, is more than adequate to counteract anything that we might see at the moment.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve seen this movie before, to borrow a phrase, in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine and the very significant spike of inflation there. And I think we found that actually our reserving processes were able to cope with that quite well,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The post Munich Re CFO confident on handling potential claims inflation from Iran war<\/a> appeared first on ReinsuranceNe.ws<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After Munich Re, one of the world\u2019s largest reinsurance companies, revealed IBNR reserves of \u20ac90 million related to the ongoing conflict in Iran, the company\u2019s CFO, Andrew Buchanan, described the figure as cautious as he highlighted Munich Re\u2019s three lines…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1956,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ateliersfurrer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1954"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ateliersfurrer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ateliersfurrer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ateliersfurrer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ateliersfurrer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1954"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/ateliersfurrer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1958,"href":"http:\/\/ateliersfurrer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1954\/revisions\/1958"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ateliersfurrer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ateliersfurrer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ateliersfurrer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ateliersfurrer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}