introduced, according to an international panel of practitioners, even after experts had predicted that the accounting rule changes would kill the industry.

It was such accounting issues of the finite risk business that were highlighted during a Bermuda Insurance Symposium panel this week which concluded that the widespread accounting rule changes had no negative impact on business.

Moderator Mr. Jay Branum, president of Inter-Ocean Reinsurance Company Ltd., said that as a result of the new accounting requirements, those "doomsayers'' prophesied incorrectly that only the US casualty business would survive.

They had said that FAS 113 and the EITF's 93-6 and 14 meant the end of finite risk reinsurance. But they were wrong.

Mr. Branum said that the theme of what's been occurring in the finite risk arena in the last couple of years has been survival through adaptation. But there's been healthy and, in some cases, robust levels of submission activity in premium volumes that continued through to the end of 1994 and up to present day.

"According to an informal survey, conducted by one of our competitor companies here in Bermuda, four companies (finite risk reinsurers) combined to write over $700 million in net premium in 1994,'' he said.

"(They are) Centre Re, Commercial Risk, Scandinavian Re and my own company, Inter-Ocean. And we expect to write at least 30 percent more business this year than we did in 1994.

"I'm informed that Centre Re alone wrote approximately $1.2 billion in gross written premium in 1994. And as you've all read, Stockton Re came into the market in the middle of last year with about $230 million in capital, primarily to concentrate, not exclusively, but primarily on this sector of the business.

"And in the more recent weeks we've read of the entry of ACE and of Liberty Mutual in the finite risk insurance side of the business. These hardly seem to me to be the anaemic levels of activity associated with a moribund market sector.

"Moreover, we have no way of estimating the amount of financial or finite risk business still being written in a very low profile way by traditional companies, on either the insurance or reinsurance side.'' Inter-Ocean Re is a joint venture among ten of the world's leading insurance and reinsurance companies. Mr. Branum is also president of Am-Re Managers (Bermuda) Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of American Re-insurance Company, which provides underwriting and other management services to Inter-Ocean.

Mr. Dave Brining, senior vice president and CFO of Scandinavian Reinsurance Company Ltd., said his firm has recorded transactions in 16 countries over four continents.

He said: "There is in excess of $1 billion in capital in Bermuda alone and some more in the US and throughout the world who operate in this area -- either with a stand alone unit, a division or just as a niche they get involved in.'' Mr. Brining said the industry's future involved the incorporation of capital market concepts into company policies, for example, using derivatives and blending coverage with debt or equity injections.

He said FAS 113 has led to the interpretation by accounting firms that they need more risk transfer, and disagreements have emerged between partners and their clients.

The clients feel they have purchased enough, although accountants are telling them to buy more. Accountants are also pushing to limit the length of contracts.

The older structures of finite risk are still being used in Latin America, Europe and Japan.

"Buyers there,'' he said, "are using stop-gap measures to meet solvency tests, or evidence of coverage or cash flow protection.

But buyers in the US and UK particularly, are becoming more sophisticated, looking for capital support through finite risk, to meet risk based capital testing, to obtain a competitive advantage and to support growth.

Others on the panel were Mr. Dirk Lohman, deputy member of the board of management, for Hannover Re in Germany, and Mr. Gregory Leonard, president of Pegasus Advisors Inc. of Simsbury, Connecticut.