What is claims-made coverage in reinsurance?

Claims-made reinsurance responds when the claim is reported to the reinsurer, inside the period, on the terms in force for that report. Occurrence reinsurance responds when the event happens inside the period, even if the report arrives years later. Those are different triggers. Paraphrasing them as "the policy year" is how you book the wrong year of account.

Long-tail classes use claims-made because late reports are the job: professional lines, some financial lines, some construction liability. Property catastrophe is usually occurrence plus an event definition. Do not copy a claims-made notice clause onto a CAT XOL and call it consistent.

How it works

The wording has to say what "made" means. Reported by the cedent to the reinsurer. Reported by the insured to the cedent. Entered on a bordereau. Those are not the same act. If the clause is only in a placing email, it is a gap.

Period still matters. Inception and expiry. Any retroactive date. Any extended reporting period, tail, or ERP. If tail is not on the page, you do not have tail. You have a hope that the next year's treaty will pick up late notices. Continuity between years is a document problem: same retroactive date, or a stated gap, or a conflict.

Claims bordereaux on a claims-made treaty need report date as a first-class field. Event date still matters for facts, for aggregation, and for whether the original policy attaches. It is not the trigger. Swapping the two columns is a silent year error.

Worked example

ACME Construction Ltd, acme.example, is on a construction liability programme. A defect in a warehouse floor is alleged to have occurred in November 2025. The cedent reports the claim to the reinsurer on 14 March 2026. The claims-made treaty in force for reports during 2026, with a retroactive date of 1 January 2024, is the contract that should see the notice if ACME is in class and territory.

The occurrence limit on the related property placing file is still USD 10,000,000, with TIV USD 42,000,000 on the slip and USD 47,100,000 on the schedule. That TIV fight does not choose the trigger. It chooses whether the warehouse is on cover at all. If the 2025 occurrence treaty was not renewed, and there is no ERP on the 2025 claims-made wording, a report in March 2026 has nowhere to go. That is a gap you can name. It is not a reason to invent tail language.

What goes wrong

Report date missing. Bordereau uses event date as if it were made date. Retroactive date taken from a summary. ERP mentioned in a renewal presentation and not in the signed wording. A dispute later pretends the parties always meant occurrence because the original policy was occurrence. The reinsurance trigger is the reinsurance wording.

Related reading

Treaty administration is treaty reinsurance. Claims inbound is reinsurer operations. Trigger fights are a common path into what causes reinsurance contract disputes?.