CCR Re’s Labilloy reports up to 20% business growth in 2020

Bertrand Labilloy, chief executive of the reinsurance arm of French state-backed CCR, has revealed the group has been able to grow the reinsurance business by almost 20 percent in 2020, having benefitted from the improving rate environment.

However, despite this growth, the impact of the pandemic has been felt in some business lines with turnover slowing down.

Speaking to The ReInsurer, Labilloy said: “We’ve experienced overall strong business growth of our business of around 15-20 percent, even if some business lines will suffer from the consequences of the Covid crisis.”

He added that turnover will be a “bit slower” in space, aviation and credit lines. 

“We have been able to benefit from price hardening in the last renewals,” he said, specifically citing Japan and other markets where CCR Re “has pricing power”, for example, the MENA region.

“We’ve also been able to develop activity in new markets, for example in South Africa and some selected markets in South America,” he added.

In July, CCR Re completed the placement of Eur300mn Tier 2 subordinated bonds in its first bond issuance.

The bond was quickly placed with more than 150 investors, mainly based in France, Europe and Asia.

CCR Re said the issue will support the development of its Streamline business plan and provide customers with a stronger solvency.

Speaking to The ReInsurer, Labilloy said the rational for the debt issuance is “three-fold”.

“The first is that it is intended to finance growth and enable us to seize market opportunities following price hardening,” he said, which he continues to see improving into 2021.

“We also wanted to optimize the capital structure of CCR by leveraging it a bit more and thirdly, we were keen to have another access point to the capital markets to finance development,” he said.

Discussing the global pandemic, Labilloy said that he feels next year will be the time when the industry will really feel the consequences of the current crisis, and while some of this will be quite tough, there’s no denying there will be a lot of positive movement on rate. 

However, he is also focused on clarifying contractual terms with clients which he said will be “crucial” across both primary and reinsurance business. 

“It will be difficult for primary insurers to completely adjust the cover of all their policies with their clients, but we have to move and we don’t want to be too exposed to more silent exposures,” he said.

While discussing future solutions for systemic risks like pandemic, he said: “In France, we’ve been working with the insurance industry and also the representative for policyholders and we managed to put on the table a technical solution which could work but it does not look like traditional reinsurance, it looks more like parametric insurance.”