Manulife Financial/AgoralNS

Reinsurance is an important part of the insurance industry, so theres no good reason that the process has to be difficult. The reason Manulife Financial was having problems dealing with its reinsurers for large life insurance policies, in what is called a facultative submission, was that so much paperwork had to be exchanged between the two sidesit would take a week or more just to find out if the reinsurer was interested. Multiply that by sixthe typical number of reinsurers Manulife contacts for a particular policyand you have a mountain of paper and a ton of waiting.

For a typical policy, we would have to copy 200 pages of documents six times, said Glenn Beuschel, team leader for Manulifes U.S. reinsurer ceded administration area. It would take several days to a week to get such a fat file delivered by courier to the reinsurers, who would then gauge how much (if any) of the risk it was willing to take on.