Convergence of insurance and derivatives

During the global financial crisis, it became fashionable to say that a CDS (Credit Default Swap) is insurance in disguise and should be regulated as such. My response used to be that (a) a lot of insurance is derivatives in disguise, (b) an LC (Letter of Credit) issued by a bank is a CDS in disguise, and (c) it might be better for both them to be regulated as derivatives with mark to market discipline and some pre/post trade transparency. Reinsurance for example is best thought of as put options on a portfolio of non traded or illiquid assets as I wrote in a blog post nearly 11 years ago.

More recently, I am beginning to think that a convergence of derivatives and insurance could happen as “parametric insurance” moves from a fringe idea to a mainstream insurance product. The common description of parametric insurance reads almost like a definition of a weather derivative:

Parametric insurance, …, provides coverage monies automatically upon the existence of certain objective weather-related parameters based upon a set formula. (Van Nostrand, J. M., & Nevius, J. G. (2011). Parametric insurance: using objective measures to address the impacts of natural disasters and climate change. Environmental Claims Journal, 23(3-4), 227-237.)

The parametric insurance literature talks a lot about “basis risk” which indicates convergence with derivatives not only in substance but also in terminology. More recently, proposals have emerged to move from digital call/put option payoffs (payout triggered by a variable such as rainfall amount, wind speed, or earthquake magnitude being observed to exceed a threshold) to more complex functional forms depending in non linear fashion on multiple indices (for example, Figueiredo, R., Martina, M. L., Stephenson, D. B., & Youngman, B. D. (2018). A Probabilistic Paradigm for the Parametric Insurance of Natural Hazards. Risk Analysis, 38(11), 2400-2414.) A traditional derivative structuring expert would be quite at home here.

Till now, parametric insurance has tended to be a niche product used for large transactions (often involving sovereigns or multilateral organizations). The derivatives analogy for this would be a transaction between two ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) counterparties. But that could change as well because FinTech (financial technology) players now see parametric insurance as an opportunity to break into the insurance space. They dream of using smart contracts and IOT (internet of things) to turn parametric insurance into a retail product. In some of these grandiose plans, a sensor in my home will inform the insurance company that it detected flood waters inside my home and the insurance company will automatically transfer the payout (or is it payoff?) to my bank account, and perhaps, all of this will happen on the blockchain. So we will have the equivalent of retail weather derivatives. I hope there will be a mark to market regulation somewhere.

Posted at 6:36 pm IST on Sat, 23 Feb 2019         permanent link

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