In a new Of Interest podcast episode, John Lyon explains why it's hard to judge insurers' finances on a year by year basis, and why NZ's risk profile is the most significant barrier to enter the local insurance market

By Gareth Vaughan

New Zealanders should be grateful insurance companies remain committed to New Zealand given the country's risk exposure, John Lyon of Ando Insurance says.

In the latest episode of the Of Interest podcast I asked Lyon how well general insurers are serving New Zealanders, how competitive the market is, and how the public should judge strong financial results from their insurers. As well as being CEO of Ando, an underwriting agency, he's also the former CEO of Lumley Insurance. 

Statistics NZ's Consumers Price Index shows insurance costs rose 14% in the June year, making them a key contributor to households' cost of living pressures and the stubbornly high non-tradable inflation that meant the Reserve Bank held the Official Cash Rate at 5.50% for as long as it did.

"I think we should be grateful that there are insurance companies who are still committed to the New Zealand market, because what we need is a healthy, strong insurance market because the risks are so great in New Zealand," Lyon says.

"When you think about the risks we're exposed to from volcanoes that are overdue, to the well known earthquake exposures, the evolving cyclone and climate change issues, [and] we don't really fully understand tsunami risk. There's lots of evidence that there have been major tsunamis along the coast of New Zealand. At what frequency would we expect something like that to happen? We don't know. That's not been particularly well modelled. That's a major risk to the country."

"There's a whole bunch of factors in there that we can talk about in terms of what New Zealand Inc needs to do to protect itself from the environment we live in. And climate change is a big part of that. But it's also all of the other generic risks that are there in front of us. So we have to think about how we manage them as well," says Lyon.

With the likes of IAG, Suncorp and Tower having recently reported strong financial results, how should we judge how well they're doing financially?

"One of the things that the reinsurers did [last year], as well as putting prices up, was they went to the insurance companies and they said, 'you now need to hold more of the risk to your own account'."

"The Suncorps and IAGs, and indeed our business, was faced with a situation where if we had been holding, say, $100 million of the risk to our own account before reinsurance comes in, the reinsurers might have put that up to $500 million. So if you think about that, then if you've got an exposure of $500 million for any one event, you're not going to get $500 million every year."

"So typically what insurance companies will do is they say, 'well, maybe over five years, we'd expect to have $100 million on average. So it'll be one big event every five years. That's $500 million. We'd spread that cost over five years.' So in every year you'd put a cat allowance [catastrophic event allowance] in of $100 million. If you don't have a cat event, you've got $100 million profit and then the next year you might have no event and you got another $100 million profit. But in year five you've got a $500 million event and you lose $500 million."

"That's the market that we have moved to. The insurance companies need to be very profitable in the good years because the cost of managing the bad years is a lot higher. So it's not just reinsurers that suffer when there is a big event. The insurance companies hold more to their bottom line and that's a challenge for all the businesses in that respect," Lyon says.

"So it's hard to judge insurance on a year on year basis."

Lyon suggests the most significant barrier to enter the general insurance market is New Zealand's risk profile, noting a number of international insurers look at NZ and see the economy is relatively small.

"It'll never be a major strategic value add to a global company in terms of incremental growth. So all you're going to have is a problem when a big thing happens like an earthquake."

In the podcast audio Lyon also talks about what he believes should be done that would be more beneficial to customers' insurance costs than a market study, how the insurance industry is lagging from a transparency perspective, the perception of choice created by the big companies being behind numerous brands, how competitive the market is, the level of market power the big players have, climate adaptation, managed retreat and uninsurable areas, whether the general insurance market is a duopoly, insurance policies being used as a taxation device, risk-based pricing, parametric insurance, what the insurance equivalent of open banking could mean, and more.

*You can find all episodes of the Of Interest podcast here.