According to a survey by the financial supervisory authority BaFin, the flood disaster in the Rhineland and the Eifel cost German insurers up to 8.2 billion euros. That is 2.5 billion more than the Bonn authority had calculated four weeks ago from the data of 136 property insurers, and more than the approximately 7 billion euros that the industry association GDV recently named. The flood does not affect the existence of the insurers and reinsurers, explained the top insurance supervisor of the Bafin, Frank Grund. "The coverage rate is falling for many companies, but only marginally for most," he said on Wednesday.
The insurers can pass a large part of the damage on to the reinsurers. The BaFin explained that 6.3 billion euros of the damage were reinsured, 3.3 billion of which were with German reinsurers. According to the BaFin survey, they expected a gross burden of four billion euros in the worst case. But they could also shift a large part of this to competitors. Net they remained sitting at a maximum of around one billion euros. Munich Re and Hannover Re are among the three largest companies in the industry in the world. Reinsurers usually assume some of the major losses that individual direct insurers otherwise threatened to overwhelm.
According to BaFin, the largest part of the net burden of direct insurers after the floods in western Germany is accounted for by homeowners insurance, around 900 million, and around 200 million each by household contents and comprehensive motor vehicle insurance. The damage would be even greater if 46 percent of German homeowners weren't insured against floods and flash floods.