The insurer's action against the party responsible after paying its own policyholder, which cuts the net cost of the claim without erasing it.
Recovery is the action by which an insurer, having paid its own policyholder, turns against the responsible third party to recoup what it disbursed. It rests legally on subrogation, which transfers the policyholder's rights to the insurer, but in practice it is a distinct trade, with its own teams, its own deadlines and its own profitability. Its economic weight is underestimated: in some lines the recovery rate moves the technical result by several points, and an ineffective recovery unit shows up in net claims cost long before it shows in gross frequency. Recovery meets three recurring obstacles: identifying the responsible party, their solvency or insurance, and limitation, which often runs from a fact the insurer learned of only late. To keep millions of small disputes out of the courts, insurers have concluded flat rate settlement agreements among themselves. The problem solved is keeping responsibility where it belongs, when insurance, by paying at once, would otherwise conceal it.
The IRSA agreement, in force between French motor insurers since 1968, settles recoveries between companies on a flat rate basis rather than file by file: each insurer pays its own policyholder directly, then recovers on a scale keyed to a typed collision scenario. That mechanism removed hundreds of thousands of disputes a year from the courts, at the cost of an accepted gap between the flat rate and the real cost of each file.
service recours, récupération sur tiers responsable