Summer may be winding down, but if July is any indication, our claims team is gearing up for what promises to be a busy end of the year. As discussed in our previous post, Euclid underwrote a record-breaking number of policies in the second half of 2020 and throughout 2021 and early 2022. The result has been a wave of new claims flooding our inboxes. With close to 80% of claims being made on policies within the first 24 months of binding, our claims team is now seeing an influx of claims on policies bound in 2021 and early 2022. In fact, in July 2023 alone, we received 34 claim notices, the most claim notices we have ever received in one month in our seven-year history. Of those, 23 are from policies bound in 2021 or 2022.
Since the beginning of 2023, we have received an average of 26 claims per month. That’s over a 20% increase compared to the average of 21.5 per month in 2022 and is nearly double the 14 claims per month we averaged in 2021. This influx of claims was anticipated: we bound 235% more policies in TTM June 2022 than we did in TTM June 2020. We do not expect much of a slowdown as the year progresses, since we bound 171% more policies in full year 2022 than we did in 2020.
As the claims keep rolling in, our claims team continues to stay on top of the volume. Since June 30th, we have reached five settlements in principle totaling $87.15M and bringing the total amount of payments made by our carriers to over $600M.
As the industry grapples with the claims volume from the post-COVID M&A boom, we understand sophisticated buyers and deal parties are increasingly focused on whether carriers they place policies with have (a) taken in enough premium in recent years to pay any potential claims fairly, without an unnecessary fight, and (b) the dedicated staffing to handle the higher amount of claims the industry will continue to see over the next couple of years. While it may cost slightly more for a policy from a market that boasts an industry-leading claims team that will be able to efficiently and effectively handle their claim, we think buyers will appreciate having spent the extra money when one does arise.
