A regulatory obligation on insurers to cede a set fraction of their treaties to a national, regional or continental reinsurer.
Compulsory cession, or legal cession, requires a country's insurers to reinsure a fixed share of their business with a designated reinsurer, often state-owned. Its stated aims are to retain premium on national territory, build local capacity and reduce foreign-exchange outflows. Its structural limit is that, by keeping the risk inside the very economy that produces it, it rebuilds the correlation reinsurance exists to break, especially where the peril is regional.
Kenya raised in 2025 the share of non-life treaties owed to its national reinsurer from 20 to 25%, while Uganda stacks three superimposed cessions.
cession légale, rétention nationale, legal cession