Aon Benfield Industry and Product Practice Groups

Our experts are aligned with industry and product groups to ensure that our dedicated expertise best meets your specific needs. In each group, our client-focused specialists use industry experience, advanced analytics, capital market products and strong market relationships to identify markets for clients and support the creation of new capacity to address the changing needs of our clients.

Accident, Health and Life (AHL)

Our experience and product expertise includes individual and group accident, health and life reinsurance, surplus relief, financing of new business and in-force block dispositions. AHL’s brokerage services include proprietary, transparent catastrophe modeling for natural perils and terrorism, dynamic financial analysis, capital adequacy analysis and pandemic modeling.

Agriculture

We design innovative tools to help clients evaluate the profitability of their agents' portfolios, quantify commodity price/yield correlation and volatility, and accurately assess loss development. We have developed a producer-level Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) fund allocation model and a proprietary Crop Reinsurance System that optimizes a client’s cessions to both federal government and private reinsurance facilities.

Aviation

With a unique ability to help insurance clients operating in this increasingly complex market, we provide custom reinsurance solutions for all areas of the aviation market. Our focus spans all major airline risks, general aviation, space/satellite and retrocessional protections on both an ultimate net-loss and original-loss warranty trigger point basis.

Construction

Our dedicated group helps you navigate the myriad of global risks, both property and casualty, faced during a construction project. From high-rise buildings to tunnels and bridges, mines, dams, power stations and petrol chemical plants, these projects often play key roles in an insurer’s growth plans. Many of these risks are new to the market and to our clients, and our experts help with many difficult coverage issues in all construction classes.

Custom Solutions

Our specialized reinsurance programs are designed to meet clients’ unique financial or operational needs and meld with existing traditional reinsurance placements to optimize risk transfer and cost. Strategic objectives include optimizing the use of reinsurance as a cost-effective risk management tool, balancing calendar year results versus long-term economic profit, stabilizing annual retained losses, focusing on capital adequacy concerns, and providing solutions to problems arising from mergers and acquisitions.

Directors and Officers (D&O)

Aon Benfield specialists have significant experience designing and delivering reinsurance products in all areas of the D&O marketplace. Our extensive D&O market studies include market experience showing frequency and severity trends by market size and industry type as well as analysis for securities class action lawsuits, option backdating, subprime lending, correlation analysis of D&O claims with mergers and acquisitions activity, IPO pricing and movement in the S&P 500 index.

Environmental

Trends indicate a greater acceptance and use of environmental insurance by Fortune 1000 companies. We leverage a unique perspective within this industry, based on more than 15 years of experience in support of both small regional carriers and large multinational carriers, to help clients plan realistically for future reinsurance needs and costs.

General Liability and Umbrella (GLUM)

Insurance companies are increasingly looking at specific niches in which to specialize in order to achieve the results they desire. Our GLUM team understands the unique difficulties and opportunities associated with being a General Liability and Umbrella writer. We have years of experience consulting with clients on their needs and are adept at using our proprietary database and actuarial analyses to educate the market and complete some of the most complex reinsurance programs in the industry.

Healthcare

In today’s continually evolving medical liability market, consideration of capital adequacy, market appetite and diversification is increasing in importance. Our extensive library of medical liability data and information, coupled with our rating agency insights, allows us to provide clients with forward-looking analyses on physician liability trends, state of the market studies, hospital liability benchmarks as well as client-specific strategies.

Marine and Energy

Onshore, offshore, gulf, catastrophe, terrorism, political risks and marine retrocession as well as transactions surrounding hull and cargo accounts largely developed as a series of niche markets. We have been able to leverage the similarities of these overlapping disciplines without losing our specialist focus in each. We have recognized the convergence of Marine and Energy with the specialty Property business, particularly Retrocession, and now combine both as part of the same team.

Motor

Our territorial-specific databases of large losses give clients unique insight into claims inflation and length of tail, and their effect on severity and frequency of losses. Clients with multi-territorial exposures benefit from our seamless collaboration with colleagues across the globe to advise on the merits and execution of multi-territory reinsurances. We help give new entrants a clearer vision of the likely pattern of large losses that might impact their account.

Personal Lines

We understand the complete range of this segment’s inherent opportunities and challenges, including: coverages; rating methodologies; business planning; catastrophe management; regulatory issues and claim adjusting and help clients achieve superior results on their gross portfolio. Given the predominantly catastrophe-orientated nature of the reinsurance needs of personal lines carriers, this group has developed strong placement expertise and contacts in the property catastrophe excess of loss marketplace.

Property

Our property brokers have expertise in designing, placing and servicing all forms of property reinsurance and possess primary, facultative and/or treaty reinsurance underwriting experience. The Property team begins by thoroughly understanding our clients’ policy-level exposures and then developing portfolio exposure management solutions, focused on helping you understand how each property program benefits their organization.

Retrocession

We provide a full array of technical and transactional capabilities, including traditional retrocession agreements and capital market solutions as well as exposure swaps and original loss warranty transactions. Dedicated and highly experienced Retrocession specialists based in New York, London, Hamburg and Bermuda, operate as a single global team, informing clients of various capital management tools available to them as well as demonstrating the most efficient ways to use and evaluate these tools.

Specialty Programs

We bring specific risk appetite knowledge to managing general agents and underwriters seeking to secure contracts with the more than 60 insurance carriers currently entertaining program business. We assist with the presentation of data to ensure that all the ingredients for a successful partnership are present.

Surety, Fidelity & Trade Credit

Our surety, fidelity and trade credit experience and insight allows us to excel in our ability to model and quantify surety risk, provide assistance with capital allocation and design and implement the most efficient surety reinsurance structure. Our diverse client base includes large and regional writers of surety, along with commercial and environmental surety specialists.

Terrorism

Brokers from Accident, Health and Life, Workers’ Compensation and Property and Casualty bring their extensive expertise across all lines to this potentially large and broad-based exposure. Our specialists employ proprietary analytical tools to assist clients in the management and assessment of emerging terrorism threats.

Workers’ Compensation

With extensive experience and insight, we help clients make informed workers’ compensation decisions as part of a comprehensive capital allocation strategy. By understanding workers’ compensation trends we can develop innovative carrier solutions and establish future market direction in this line of business. To optimize clients’ operating results we provide analysis and trend information related to state, business class and market conditions.