Jim Bryce is a man who prides himself on keeping his promises.

When it comes to reinsurance practices, the chief executive of IPC Re Holdings Limited believes in putting your money where your mouth is.

“The only thing we're really selling, is a promise to pay,” he says. “We verbally commit and then formally commit with documentation of the policy.”

Much of the time, reinsurers are not called upon to pay out on their promises. But if a reinsurance company starts to make commitments to pay when they could not afford to pay out in the event of a claim, they can easily end up selling a false promise.

Mr. Bryce cites the example of Fortress Re, an aviation reinsurer which allegedly kept writing business when they ought to have known they were insolvent due to the four airline losses of September 11.

But in IPCRe's case, they try to publish their worst case scenario, the total sums that they would have to pay if claims were made on every single one of their policies.

“One of the keystones we've always had is ‘What you see is what you get',” says Mr. Bryce. He liked the motto so much that he had “WYSIWYG” printed on company hats.

“Everyone is running around saying transparency, but we are the only ones who are publishing aggregate exposures,” he points out.

Staying ahead of the curve in terms of corporate governance issues may be one reason why during what he describes as “a very trying time” for the reinsurance industry, IPCRe has managed to excel.

While other companies were licking their wounds after the World Trade Center tragedy, IPCRe closed 2001 in their strongest financial position up to the at time. They closed 2002 in an even stronger position and to satisfy client demand, they had to double in size.

“It has literally destroyed some reinsurance companies,” says Mr. Bryce. “We reversed the trend of most of the world's leading reinsurance markets.”

He says that very little of the WTC liabilities have actually been paid. Once it is established whether it was one event or two events, he predicts that more bad news will emerge.

He attributes IPC's success to “a very successful partnership between capital providers, producers and brokers, clients who have been very loyal in our first ten years and lastly the employees who have been with us. Teamwork was one of the main factors.”

It's a formula which has led to Mr. Bryce being named the Bermuda Insurance Institute's Insurance leader of the year. Asked how it feels to win this award, Mr. Bryce says: “I must admit after travelling here on business for going on 25 years and being here for ten years, it's quite something.”

IPCRe's main line of business is natural perils, the kind of catastrophes which hit the news and have what insurers call “the CNN factor”. If you see it on CNN, you know it's bad news for IPCRe.

As a result, despite a healthy sense of humour, Mr. Bryce appears to have a slightly unhealthy interest in natural disasters.

He appears to know all the major natural catastrophes of the past five years and runs through them: 1999 was apparently a very bad year with a frequency of losses that was hard to believe, including the largest tornado to hit the US, earthquakes in Turkey, Taiwan and India, a cyclone in Mauritius, “Lefty Lenny” the only storm ever to go the “wrong way” in the Caribbean, the worst storms ever to hit France and flooding in Korea.

IPCRe do not subscribe to any sort of system for predicting when the next natural catastrophe is going to take place, but they are a superstitious bunch, says Mr. Bryce. He says that when they are in a meeting talking about business, there's a lot of “knocking on wood” going on.

One of the most important innovations in his industry has been the advent of modelling, he says “It's very useful, but we overlay the model with a level of common sense.

“One of the weaknesses of the model is that we are relying on unaudited information coming from the client.

“Consequently the client's got to be of the highest integrity,” he says. Quoting Warren Buffett he says: “A bad reinsurance contract is like a trip into hell. So easy to get there and very difficult to get out.”