Continuing with our monthly updates on how Covid-19 is changing the landscape for M&A, below are Euclid Transactional’s stats through August on global R&W/W&I insurance submissions and policies bound for 2020. In August, policy submissions increased, finally returning to 2019 levels after dropping around 70% in April. We also saw continued increase in bound policies and consistently higher average deal sizes compared to April through June. Although the number of bound deals was down nearly 30% from August 2019, we were encouraged to bind more than four times the number of policies bound in April when Covid-19 prevented many deals from signing. Despite the decrease in the number of policies bound in August 2020 vs. 2019, the average cost of our US primary policies increased by over 10% compared to the lowest pricing of 2019.  We attribute this increase in rate to clients and brokers recognizing that Euclid and other established markets have paid hundreds of millions of dollars of claims over the last 12 months and they value working with insurers that have a proven track record for fairly and efficiently paying claims.

Do these numbers line up with what you are seeing in the deal world and the quotes you are receiving for R&W insurance? Do you expect this increase in deal flow to continue through the election in November and beyond? Feel free to reach out to Euclid Transactional to discuss this data or anything else.