With club retentions set to rise by $1m to $9m next month, the argument is whether clubs would be better off with a radically different strategy of reverting to the situation 20 years ago when pooling began at $2m.
The starting point for that debate at the Piraeus Marine Club was that if pooling claims above $9m are analogous to reinsurance at cost price, why give premium away to a reinsurer for claims at a much lower level?
Steve Roberts of the London Club argued that claims above the $2m level have many of the characteristics of much larger claims, being almost random in incidence, so they can be pooled like higher-value claims.
Roberts
