Industry Description

ReTech products and services are aimed at the global insurance and reinsurance industry. This worldwide industry is made up of approximately 6,500 primary insurance companies, about 4,500 captive insurance companies, numerous specialty insurance pools, and hundreds of reinsurers.

Reinsurance is simply "insurance" for primary insurance companies, e.g. the local and national insurance companies that everyone knows, deals with, and reads about every day. On the other hand, reinsurance companies are usually international giants that almost no one outside the financial industry knows about - at least that was true until AIG became a household name during the financial meltdown of 2008. Reinsurance allows a primary insurer to spread its assumed (written) risks (exposure) and thereby reduce its exposure to vast potential liabilities or the financial ruin that could result from a catastrophic loss event such as a hurricane, an earthquake, a failed launch of a communication satellite, a disaster at a nuclear power plant, or even an airline crash. Therefore, nearly all insurers support their books of business with reinsurance to (i) provide greater regulatory capacity known as policyholder's surplus; policyholder's surplus allows a company to write more insurance and gain greater profits, while reinsurance protects the company's bottom line from catastrophic losses by spreading a portion of its risk exposure among the universe of highly capitalized worldwide reinsurers.