Risk insurers are life insurers mainly providing biometric insurance products like risk life or disability insurance. Therefore, their most important source of revenues is the profit margin of their biometric products. From the point of view of the customers this is a very important point because it is directly related to their premium paid: In general, risk life insurers reduce the premiums paid making use of the customer’s profit participation. If, however, risk returns are low, then the customer’s profit participation will decrease and insurance premiums paid will increase. In this ranking we compare the German risk life insurers with respect to their financial strength. Healthy risk insurers are acting and calculating in a prudent way, having stable and profitable products. We therefore expect them to be financially strong in future, too.
Measuring Financial Health.
To quantify a risk insurer’s financial health we use the Economic Capital Ratio. It is simply the company’s available capital divided by its assets. This ratio enables us to rank and compare insurers of different size. Indeed, it is not the size that matters, but whether the insurer has the financial means to be resilient in adverse situations. Computing the economic capital of a risk life insurer is the core of RealRate’s computational model. Picking the most important information from the annual business reports, we transform those accounting values to economic market values. This approach is especially important for German risk life insurers since their statutory accounting relies on book values often being quite different from fair market values. In addition, their business model and corresponding accounting is difficult and deviates from other industries. The Economic Capital Ratio is a forward-looking key ratio capturing financial health in just one figure.
In the RealRate ranking of 2017, Dialog Lebensversicherung overtook Delta Direkt Lebensversicherung to take first place. Dialog’s risk result has again been very strong, while Delta Direkt’s risk result, while still well above market average, has weakened compared to the previous year. Third place was again taken by Credit Life.
 | 1. Dialog Leben | |
 | 2. Delta Direkt Leben | |
 | 3. Credit Life | |
 | 4. InterRisk Leben | |
 | 5. Deutsche Lebensversicherungs-AG | |
 | 6. EUROPA Leben | |
 | 7. COSMOS Leben | |
 | 8. Hannoversche Leben | |
 | 9. WGV Leben | |
 | 10. ERGO Direkt Leben |