CICA-RE (Joint Reinsurance Company of the CIMA Member States)

CICA-RE, the Joint Reinsurance Company of the Member States of the Inter-African Conference on Insurance Markets (CIMA), is the zone's joint reinsurer, headquartered in Lomé, and receives a legal cession that CIMA rules impose on the zone's insurers. In 1981, the states of the International Conference of Insurance Supervisors, known as CICA, created a joint reinsurance company, headquartered in Lomé. When the 1992 treaty replaced CICA with the Inter-African Conference on Insurance Markets, the company kept its acronym and became the Joint Reinsurance Company of the CIMA Member States. Its capital is held by the states and by insurance companies in the zone. The principle is that of Africa Re, on the scale of a smaller and more integrated market: keep within the zone part of the reinsurance premiums that used to go to Europe, and with them CFA francs converted into hard currency. CIMA rules require insurers in the zone to cede a quota share of their business to CICA-RE, the legal cession, whose rate and base have been amended by regulation over the years. In the states concerned, it comes on top of the cession owed to Africa Re, and ahead of placing the rest on the market. For an Ivorian or Cameroonian insurer, it is a structural cost: part of its premiums goes to a reinsurer it did not choose. For a foreign underwriter reinsuring a fronting arrangement in the CIMA zone, on an industrial risk or a CPRI (credit and political risk insurance) line written locally, the practical question is the order of cessions: whether CICA-RE's share is taken from the local retention or from the reinsurance, and whether it follows the treaty terms or those of the risk. Brokers settle it in the placement slip, and an oversight gets paid for at the first claim. The caveat is the base: some classes and some risks are treated separately in the rules, and the version in force has to be reread rather than relying on how the last renewal was done.