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.
