Lloyd’s of London aptly refers to insurance as “the protection of the few, by the many”, with its purpose being to restore the insured to the position that existed immediately prior to the incident that led to a loss, damage or liability. Insurance uses the pooling concept to provide cover against financial losses by collecting premiums, investing some of the funds and using the pool of money to pay out claims, simultaneously covering operating expenses and ensuring sustainability by creating reserves and adding value to the insurance company. Fundamentals of insurance is a concise yet comprehensive introduction to insurance, specifically for South African circumstances.

Fundamentals of insurance highlights the need for commercial and personal insurance by explaining the financial objectives of firms and individuals, the role of financial statements and financial analysis, the valuation of assets and how risk management and insurance are related. It details how insurance business needs to be conducted, the procedures for handling claims, as well as the fundamental aspects of personal and commercial insurance. It provides a comprehensive framework and guidelines, with self-assessment questions at the end of each chapter, and prepares aspiring insurers for the entry level of the insurance industry.

Fundamentals of insurance is aimed at insurance students as well as organisations and institutions in the insurance field.

More than 60 000 readers can attest to finding Making Money out of Property an indispensable guide to investing in the lucrative South African property market. This bestselling property book has been updated to include the most current tax requirements and the latest developments relating to the local property market.

Author and property expert Jason Lee sets out every step of the property-investing process, including how to find the right deals, how to negotiate and finance a property, and whether to hold on to or sell a property for financial gain. This book focuses on some of the professionals’ best-kept secrets, such as how to utilise agreements of sale, property investment structures, financing options and key economic factors influencing the property cycle. Most importantly, it explains how to make money in both rising and falling property markets.

Making Money out of Property is a must-read for any first-time property purchaser or investor, as well as for experienced investors looking to polish their skills.

Combined Transport Documents provides a comprehensive guide to combined transport or multi-modal contracts. It examines the main contracts that deal with combined transport logically, from those concerned with the procuring of tonnage through to those that deal with general average and salvage. It also focuses on the complicated chains of indemnity particular to multimember consortium operations and explains in substantial detail a recommended draft bill of lading contract of carriage which the author himself developed. Combined Transport Documents provides a comprehensive guide to combined transport or multi-modal contracts. It examines the main contracts that deal with combined transport logically, from those concerned with the procuring of tonnage through to those that deal with general average and salvage. It also focuses on the complicated chains of indemnity particular to multi-member consortium operations and explains in substantial detail a recommended draft bill of lading contract of carriage which the author himself developed.

A universal guide to understanding and managing life insurance companies in the new millennium. Containing a succinct analysis of those disciplines upon which the worldwide life insurance industry is built. The intention of this book is to introduce the student of life insurance to the range and complexity of issues that pertain to the management and development of a life insurance company and to equip insurance company managers with a ready reference to the fundamental aspects of those facets and disciplines of the business with which they may not be familiar. Much material on life insurance subjects is available to the specialised reader. The aim of this book is to reach those with limited knowledge of the industry and to provide a comprehensive picture of the operation, management and development of a life insurance company as a whole.

This book assesses the role of the doctrine of insurable interest within modern insurance law by examining its rationales and suggesting how shortcomings could be fixed. Over the centuries, English law on insurable interest - a combination of statutes and case law - has become complex and unclear. Other jurisdictions have relaxed, or even abolished, the requirement for an insurable interest. Yet, the UK insurance industry has overwhelmingly supported the retention of the doctrine of insurable interest. This book explores whether the traditional justifications for the doctrine - the policy against wagering, the prevention of moral hazard and the doctrine's relationship with the indemnity principle - still stand up to scrutiny and argues that, far from being obsolete, they have acquired new significance in the global financial markets and following the liberalisation of gambling. It is also argued that the doctrine of insurable interest is an integral part of a system of insurance contract law rules and market practice. Rather than rejecting the doctrine, the book recommends a recalibration of insurable interest to afford better pre-contractual transparency to a proposer as to the suitability of the policy to his or her interest in the subject-matter to be insured. Providing a powerful defence for the retention of insurable interest, this book will appeal to both academics and practitioners working in the field of insurance law.

Risks can be identified, evaluated, and mitigated, but the underlying uncertainty remains elusive. Risk is present across all industries and sectors. As a result, organizations and governments worldwide are currently experiencing higher levels of risk and have had to make risky decisions during times of crisis and instability, including the COVID-19 pandemic, economic and climate perils, and global tensions surrounding terrorism. It is essential that new studies are undertaken to understand strategies taken during these times to better equip business leaders to navigate risk management in the future. Global Risk and Contingency Management Research in Times of Crisis examines the impact of crises including the COVID-19 pandemic, which has tested organizational risk and contingency management plans. It provides significant insights that should benefit business leaders on risk and contingency management in times of crisis. It emphasizes strategies that leaders can undertake to identify potential future risks and examines decisions made in past crises that can act as examples of what to do and what not to do during future crisis events. Covering topics such as auditing theories, risk assessment, and educational inequality, this premier reference source is a crucial resource for business leaders, executives, managers, decision makers, policymakers, students, government officials, entrepreneurs, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

Risk Adjustment, Risk Sharing and Premium Regulation in Health Insurance Markets: Theory and Practice describes the goals, design and evaluation of health plan payment systems. Part I contains 5 chapters discussing the role of health plan payment in regulated health insurance markets, key aspects of payment design (i.e. risk adjustment, risk sharing and premium regulation), and evaluation methods using administrative data on medical spending. Part II contains 14 chapters describing the health plan payment system in 14 countries and sectors around the world, including Australia, Belgium, Chile, China, Columbia, Germany, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland and the United States. Authors discuss the evolution of these payment schemes, along with ongoing reforms and key lessons on the design of health plan payment.

The effective delivery of healthcare services is vital to the general welfare and well-being of a country's citizens. Financial infrastructure and policy reform can play a significant role in optimizing existing healthcare programs. Health Economics and Healthcare Reform: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice is a comprehensive source of academic material on the importance of economic structures and policy reform initiatives in modern healthcare systems. Highlighting a range of pertinent topics such as clinical costing, patient engagement, and e-health, this book is ideally designed for medical practitioners, researchers, professionals, and students interested in the optimization of healthcare delivery.

For undergraduate courses in risk managementand insurance. Principles and practices: Managing risk withconsumer considerations Redja's Principles of RiskManagement and Insurance provides an in-depth examination of majorrisk themes. Using rich and up-to-date content on the basic concepts of riskand insurance, and introductory and advanced topics in traditional andenterprise risk management, the text is relevant to a wide number ofdisciplines in the business realm. Fully updated and revised, the 14thEdition covers global topics ranging from natural disasters andterrorism, to domestic issues like the ever-evolving Affordable CareAct and healthcare reform. Principles sets itselfapart by placing primary emphasis on insurance consumers and blends basic riskmanagement and insurance principles with consumer considerations, allowingstudents to apply basic concepts to their own personal risk management andinsurance programs.

Reinsurance is an invisible service industry which enables insurance companies to insure more risks and to make better use of their resources. Until recently, reinsurers were only known to a small minority outside the insurance community. Major disasters, especially those caused by natural catastrophes, have increasingly brought the industry into the spotlight. Yet what is perceived today by a wider public still only represents a fraction of the industry, and the mechanisms of reinsurance to deal with global risk exposure are virtually unknown. The Value of Risk provides an overview of how today's reinsurance industry developed. It investigates for the first time the role of reinsurers in a changing risk, economic, and market environment. Harold James explains the fundamental principles of insuring and outlines the evolution of the industry in his introductory essay. In Part I, Peter Borscheid describes in detail the global spread of modern insurance, which emerged in the late eighteenth century amidst ideas of rationalism which attempted to quantify risk in monetary terms, the setbacks it encountered, and how the market environment changed over time. Professional reinsurance emerged with the rise in insured risks in the industrialising mid-nineteenth century. By the time the San Francisco Earthquake happened in 1906 the reinsurance industry had become well established and showed a remarkable ability to deal collectively with the catastrophe. David Gugerli describes in Part II how the industry as a whole dealt with such challenges but also the numerous exposures to a changing risk landscape. Against this background, in Part III Tobias Straumann examines the history of the Swiss Reinsurance Company, founded in 1863, providing a fascinating example of how professional risk taking was developed over the last 150 years.

In the midst of globalization, technological change and economic anxiety, we have deep doubts about how well that task of investor protection is being performed. In the U.S., the focus is on the Securities & Exchange Commission. Part of the explanation is economic and political: the failure to know the right balance between investor protection and capital formation, and the resulting battle among interest groups over their preferred solutions. This book's main claim, however, is that regulation is also frustrated at nearly every turn by human nature, as exhibited both on the buy-side (investors) and sell-side (corporate executives, bankers, stockbrokers). There is plenty of savvy and guile, but also ample hope, fear, ego, overconfidence, social contagion and the like that persistently filter and distort the messages regulators try to send. This book is the first sustained effort to link the key initiatives of securities regulation with our burgeoning awareness in the social sciences of how people and organizations really behave in economic settings. It examines why corporate fraud occurs and how best to deter it and compensate its victims; the search for an edge via insider trading; the disclosure apparatus and its gatekeepers; sales efforts and manipulation in Ponzi schemes, internet scams, private offerings and crowdfunding; and how this all helps explain the recent global financial crisis. It ends by turning these insights back on the task of regulation itself, and the strategies (and frustrations) of making regulation work in a financial world that is at once increasingly sophisticated yet deeply human and incurably flawed.

Eliminate frustration and confusion about the value of Life Insurance policies. This approachable book reveals the costs and benefits of various types of life insurance policies, annuities and investment options.

View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction.

"(Wright and Smith) have written a remarkably lucid and elegantly organized history that keeps the major themes in view, even while discussing the minutiae of crafting and marketing various new insurance products or of managing the firm and its investment portfolio. As the authors themselves point out, the history of life insurance has not attracted much serious scholarship or inspired writing. Fortunately, Mutually Beneficial has both. It integrates the Guardian's career into a wider account of the American life-insurance business and American economic history more generally, and it manages to do so with a light touch."
--Geoffrey Clark, "Harvard Business History Review"

"(Mutually Beneficial is), without doubt, a major contribution to the economics and history of life insurance in the twentieth century. Wright and Smith have provided, for example, the most comprehensive account yet of product development, and the section on investment strategies is also important. In sum this will make a fine addition to the library of insurance historians, and to financial and business historians more generally."
--Robin Pearson, "Accounting, Business & Financial History"

"The matieral is well documented. The authors have produced a nonvanity company history that goes behind the scenes to describe the company's corporate culture and policies and provide a explanation of how ethical and business precepts have led to consistent profitability."
--"Enterprise & Society"

Mutually Beneficial tells the story of the evolution of The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, one of the most important life and health insurers inthe history of the U.S. economy and life insurance industry. Relying on exclusive access to the company's archives, interviews with its current executive officers, the public record, and scholarly articles and monographs, Robert E. Wright and George David Smith provide a strategic analysis of Guardian, from its founding to its standing in the insurance world today.

Mutually Beneficial also describes the origin of Guardian's distinctive approach to business-its corporate culture and policy-and how these principles flow from the ethical and business precepts of its founders. By rigorously attending to its policyholders as a matter of practice as well as principle, Guardian has long been one of the most consistently profitable life insurance firms as measured by return on net wealth. This unique history will be of interest to anyone in the insurance business, as well as financial and economic professionals.

Whether you are thinking about entering the contract cleaning business, have a young company that may be struggling to get to the next level, or have a mature organization that may need to look at things in a different light, this book is for you. From naming your company to selling your company, this book covers all the bases. Dick takes you through the mistakes he made when starting his company, to the stumbling he did along the way, and how he got up and kept going. Some of his real life stories will amuse while others will make you sit back and take note of how you can make a correction in your company that can save or earn lots of dollars for you. Dick includes ways to approach a banker, attorney, accountant, insurance agent as well as the supplier of your cleaning products and equipment. Doing these things right will put money on your bottom line, doing them wrong may put you out of business in a hurry. Not to be forgotton, he also includes a chapter on preparing your company for sale. Dick sold his company and can provide helpful suggestions on what you need to do and not do to be ready to sell. Dick interjects humor along the way to emphasize some of his mistakes and what he learned from them. You will particularly want to read chapter 18 where he talkes about his favorite sayings and how they affected him. In that same chapter he also talks about actual calls he took from employees calling in to report they would not be at work and how he handled the calls. Last but not least, he provides you his thoughts on how to focus on becoming a leader as well as what he envisons the characteristics of real success are. This book is designed as a working tool. It is written in conversational style and will provide you a true encloypedia for being in the contract cleaning business. Enjoy and learn.