Payouts to our clients in 2016

Innovative solutions, as described on these pages, all help to extend insurance protection. Three such solutions we have helped develop in recent years showed their practical benefits in 2016 by making payouts to their clients.

In the Caribbean, Hurricane Matthew caused many casualties and brought widespread destruction across the region. CCRIF SPC (www.ccrif.org) – formerly the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility – which we have been reinsuring since 2008, made payouts totalling USD 29 million to the governments of Haiti, Barbados, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines within two weeks of the disaster. This brought the total of emergency payouts to 21 since 2007, worth USD 68 million.

In southern China, Typhoon Haima fortunately had a less severe human toll but destroyed many houses and crops. The city of Shanwei in Guangdong Province is one of the prefectures that earlier in the year had signed up to our parametric insurance programme against natural disaster risks and so received a payout less than a week after the impact.

In Mexico, the MultiCat cat bond, which we helped to develop in 2009 in cooperation with the World Bank, made a payout of USD 50 million to the Mexican government early in the year. The payment was triggered by Hurricane Patricia in October 2015. When the storm formed off Mexico’s western coast, it was one of the strongest hurricanes on record. Fortunately, it weakened before making landfall and took a track over more rural areas, sparing many lives.