About
Reinsurance, taught the way it is actually placed
{{name}} is a study tool for people who work in or around reinsurance and want the vocabulary to stop being vocabulary — to become something they can calculate with.
The problem it solves
Most reinsurance glossaries give you a sentence per term. A sentence is enough to recognise a word in a meeting and not nearly enough to know what it does to a number. You can read the definition of a reinstatement premium ten times and still not be able to say what one costs after a $60M hurricane in October.
So every term here carries five things instead of one: a definition, a worked example, a scenario with real figures in US dollars, two questions with explanations, and a word problem whose answer stays hidden until you have had a go at it.
Who it is for
Primary audience
Working professionals
Underwriters, brokers, claims and finance staff who deal with treaties but were never formally taught them.
Also useful for
New joiners
Graduate intakes and lateral hires from primary insurance who need the ceded side quickly.
And for
Exam candidates
Anyone revising reinsurance modules where the marks are in the calculation, not the definition.
It assumes you know what an insurance policy is and what a loss ratio means. It does not assume you have ever seen a slip.
How the twenty terms were chosen
They are ordered the way a placement is built rather than alphabetically, in five families of four. Each family assumes the one above it, so working straight down the index is a syllabus.
How the numbers are made
Figures are deliberately round — $10M retentions, 30% commissions, four-layer towers — because the point is the mechanism, not the arithmetic. Every calculation in every scenario and word problem was checked programmatically before publication, so if a total does not add up, that is a bug and we would like to hear about it.
The figures are illustrative. They are not market rates, not a quotation, and not evidence of what any layer should cost. Real wordings vary enormously — hours clauses, ALAE treatment, indexation and reinstatement provisions are all negotiated, and the version in your treaty beats the version described here every time.
What it is not
- Not advice. Nothing here is legal, regulatory, actuarial or financial advice, and nothing should be relied on when structuring or pricing a real programme.
- Not a wording library. Clause behaviour is described in general terms, and general terms are exactly what disputes are about.
- Not an account system. There is nothing to sign up for. Your progress lives in your own browser, and only there.
Where it goes next
The twenty terms are the spine. The obvious extensions are a second tier of terms — clash covers, sidecars, cat bonds, commutation, fronting, collateral and cut-through — plus a mode that gives you a randomised set of word problems across the whole map rather than one term at a time.
If you use this for training and want something specific added, say so.