Insurance giant Aviva post rise in profits despite flood payouts
Insurance giant Aviva posted a slight rise in profits in the face of record payouts due to last summer's floods
Insurance giant Aviva posted a slight rise in profits in the face of record payouts due to last summer's floods.
Aviva, which is the trading name of the Norwich Union brand, said that profits had risen by 1% to £3.29bn in 2007.
General insurance profits, which include car and home insurance, fell by more than a third in a what was a "challenging year". Aviva said 45,000 home insurance customers and 6,000 business customers had made claims after the floods and it had made interim or full payments in 99% of cases.
Chief executive Andrew Moss raised confidence in the insurance market by stressing that the insurance business was in good shape and was: "pretty confident about the outlook for the future".
"I think they are a robust set of results in the face of some quite challenging conditions, both in terms of economic conditions but some particular issues in our home general insurance markets, where we have seen the worst UK floods for 60 years,"
said Moss, who took the chief executive role last July.
Despite the clean up of the flood damage hitting the insurance company's coffers to the tune of £475m, Aviva's other market interests in life insurance and savings ( both high growth areas ) allowed this slight rise in profits.
In short the increase of the average age is allowing areas such as life insurance and savings to grow whilst 'acts of god', though apparently commonplace these days will not make long term damage to the insurance market.
Authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority
