Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter (CPCU) 540 Practice Exam

Capacity reflects how much risk an insurer can safely underwrite given its financial strength and risk transfer arrangements. Capital and surplus show the cushion available to absorb losses, written premiums signal the volume of risk the company is taking on, and reinsurance recoverables indicate how much risk has been shifted and how much can potentially be recovered from reinsurers. Policy counts, by contrast, simply tally the number of policies and don’t directly capture the size of exposure, policy limits, or risk concentration. Two insurers can have the same policy count but very different total exposures, financial strength, and reinsurance support. Therefore, policy counts are not used to determine capacity.