Loss of staff, tech glitch delay General Accident audited report

It has been more than five months since General Accident Insurance Company, GENAC, closed its financial year, but the company has been unable to deliver its audited accounts to the market due to what it now says are problems linked to staff resignation and tech glitches.

Listed companies have two months to publish their audited accounts, with an extension allowed under the pandemic of a few weeks. But GENAC has long surpassed even that period and had last promised to have its report available to the market by May 20. The company previously supplied its unaudited December fourth-quarter results in February, but its audited accounts still weren’t posted up to market close on Friday.

Managing Director Sharon Donaldson told the Financial Gleaner that the loss of a key member of staff delayed a total systems switchover at General Accident’s Trinidad subsidiary, which affected the company’s year-end calculations.

A remedial team was sent from Jamaica to fix the problems.

“We had late actuarial evaluations coming out of Trinidad. It took a little longer because we had a new system put in, and the conversion from one platform to the next took longer than we thought it would,” Donaldson said in between meetings in Trinidad.

She said all the glitches have now been cleared, and the necessary reports for the consolidated numbers will be ready in another few days.

Based on the company’s unaudited accounts, General Accident, which has been making acquisitions in the Caribbean since the pandemic, may deliver better results this year relative to 2020, but perhaps not by much.

Initially, the general insurer’s fourth-quarter report indicated that the full-year profit after taxes for 2021 had nearly doubled from $194 million to $345 million. However, those preliminary numbers were further updated with the release of the company’s first quarterly results for 2022 showing a dramatic change in net profit of $205 million for 2021 .

Growth across the region produced gross written premiums of $3.7 billion for the January-March 2022 quarter, an increase of 11 per cent compared to the similar period in 2021. About $3.4 billion of that came from Jamaica, Donaldson said, adding that while it is still early days, the new acquisitions were performing well.

Profit rose from $15 million to $25 million.

In the first quarter, she added, the Trinidad subsidiary wrote premiums of $201.2 million, up 40 per cent year on year while the Barbados subsidiary wrote premiums of $108.7 million, up 75 per cent.

“To put it into perspective, for the March first quarter, Barbados and Trinidad combined contributed 8.4 per cent to our premium income. This is an improved contribution when compared to their 6.2 per cent in the prior year,” Donaldson said.

General Accident started its involvement in Trinidad in late 2019 with a 55 per cent stake in a struggling Motor One Insurance. That stake was increased to 100 percent by 2020. The Barbados entry was based on a start-up operation in 2020. Donaldson had previously predicted that General Accident T&T would be in the black by the end of 2022, with Barbados to follow soon after. She says, so far, the subsidiaries are well ahead of target.

“The losses for Trinidad are trending down and the premium income is growing well. We are very bullish about the rest of the year,” Donaldson said.

neville.graham@gleanerjm.com