New insurance data trailed in Quarterly Bulletin Signed Article

The Central Bank of Ireland has published a signed article from the first Quarterly Bulletin of 2018, due to be published on 26 January 2018.

The article, Insurance Corporations Statistics in Ireland: Introducing the New Quarterly Statistics, by Anne-Marie Kelly and Jenny Osborne-Kinch, introduces a set of new statistics that will be published on a quarterly basis from the end of March 2018 onwards. The data covers insurance corporations resident in Ireland and will contribute to improved euro area wide statistics being produced by the European Central Bank to support better analysis and monitoring of non-bank institutions.

The dataset considers the size and operations of the life insurance, non-life insurance and reinsurance sectors, and offers a breakdown of the holdings by financial instrument for each of the sub-sectors of the insurance industry.

The article finds:

• As a subsector of the Irish financial sector, insurance corporations represented 6% of total assets in 2016, compared to a euro area average of 11%. This sector has grown steadily over the past five years, with total assets amounting to €303 billion in the second quarter of 2017. This is equivalent to 110% of GDP, which is the third highest in the euro area.
• There were 243 insurance corporations operating in the Irish market at the end of June 2017, of which 202 represent head offices or subsidiaries, while the remaining 41 are domestic branches.
• Life insurance corporations account for the majority of the sector, contributing 79% to total assets, followed by reinsurance (13%) and non-life insurance corporations (8%).
• The foreign share of the insurance sector in Ireland accounts for 85% of total premiums written, with the remaining 15% of premiums earned domestically. This highlights the importance of foreign business to premium income in the Irish Insurance industry.

Notes

The views expressed in these articles are not necessarily those held by the Central Bank of Ireland.