During this year’s annual International Union of Marine Insurance (IUMI) conference, initial findings from IUMI’s major claims database were made available for the first time.

Following three years of development, the database is now sufficiently reliable for IUMI to publish a set of global cargo claims data.

Dave Matcham, Chief Executive, International Underwriting Association; and project leader and secretary to IUMI’s Facts & Figures Committee explains:

“We began this initiative by establishing and proving the concept three years ago. Since then we have recruited 22 national insurance associations who are all IUMI members and together we have made a significant investment in gathering reliable and consistent data on both hull and cargo losses. This year – our third year of development – we have received 6,800 records of major (greater than US$250,000) losses totaling US$10.2 billion. Because cargo underwriting tends to be more evenly spread geographically than hull, we have more robust data for that insurance line and we are now ready to make public our initial major cargo claims conclusions.”

Sufficient information dating back to 2013 has now been collected on a range of metrics and from this, five specific data fields have been identified where the data is reliable enough to be published, these are:

• Year of accident
• Underwriting year
• Loss amount
• Type of loss
• Mode of transport

Working in close partnership with IUMI Professional Partner, the Boston Consulting Group, IUMI has been able to undertake and publish some early analysis of this information. Examples include a year-on-year comparison of numbers of major cargo claims versus their average value; number of losses categorised by value range; value of different types of claims; and claim numbers and values attributed to various transport modes.

The analysis was presented at the IUMI conference.

“This is a unique database that is beginning to give a meaningful global insight into major cargo claims. Information of this breadth cannot be found elsewhere and it will allow underwriters to benchmark their own activity against global performance to better inform future decisions”, said Matcham.

IUMI is working to recruit more national insurance associations to increase the number of claims records contained within the database. It also intends to grow the number of reliable data fields so that further data analysis can take place. Once confidence in the hull data is at a sufficient level, IUMI intends to publish an initial analysis of global hull claims also.

IUMI will publish the initial cargo analysis in its annual Stats Report later this year. Meantime, more information can be found from www.iumi.com

IUMI wishes to thank the Boston Consulting Group and the IUMI project team members for their valuable contribution to the major claims database.