Ratings agency Standard & Poor's (S&P) has announced it will meet 27 insurers it has identified as having "significant" asbestos exposures.

Ratings agency Standard & Poor's (S&P) has announced it will hold meetings insurers with "significant" asbestos exposures.

The meetings are planned to review the industry's asbestos reserving strategies, in a week when several leading insurers increased their asbestos reserves.

An S&P statement said that S&P had expected reserves to cost up to $10bn (£6.1bn).

The ratings agency added that recent reserve-strengthening moves by St. Paul and Hartford had called its assumptions on reserves into question.

An S&P spokesman said: "These high reserve additions highlight the difficulty of making industry wide loss estimates and cast doubt on the survival ratio as a metric to assess reserve adequacy for any insurer."

The ratings agency plans to discuss its strategy for financing reserve needs with industry figures. S&P will then incorporate this information into its analyses, it said.

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