India Obligatory Cession Data: Dataset Structure and Field Coverage

Obligatory cession data tracks the reinsurance business Indian insurers must cede: the shares IRDAI mandates and the placements that follow, including what lands with India's domestic reinsurer GIC Re. Cedants and reinsurers track these shares year on year because the mandate shapes every voluntary placement negotiated on top of it.

The rest of the catalog supports rather than replaces it. All 8 reinsurance datasets Datadory catalogs are free - mirroring 1,437 of the 1,744 datasets catalog-wide - so fragmentation, not price, is the working problem. Only 3 of the 8 expose machine access, against 574 of 1,744 via official API catalog-wide.

IRDAI Annual Reports (India Insurance & Reinsurance Statistics) is the core. OECD Insurance Market Indicators (INSIND - Premiums, Penetration, Density) supplies the benchmarking layer. Three further sources round out the workflow - an Australian regulator archive to compare publishing practice against, London's market register to see where ceded business goes, and a tidy frontier-market panel to model against.

Read the ranking top-down as a workflow: extract the mandate from rank 1, contextualise it with rank 2, then borrow pipeline design from ranks 3 to 5.

Around the reports themselves, IRDAI's statistics navigation adds Monthly business figures split into Life and Non-Life sub-pages, Segment wise data, Graphical Representation of Monthly Business Figures, Claims, Handbooks on Indian Insurance Statistics, Motor Third Party Data, Committee Reports and Industry Trends - useful supplements, though only the annual reports carry the cession mandate.

OECD Insurance Market Indicators (INSIND - Premiums, Penetration, Density) is the open benchmark for whatever retention levels you extract. It covers 71 OECD member and partner countries annually from 1983 to 2022 - 31,560 observations - with 24 indicators each split by Total, Life and Non-Life segment. Two speak directly to cession work: the retention ratio (indicator VII) and the ratio of reinsurance accepted (VIII_1 Total, VIII_2 Life, VIII_3 Non-Life), which alone contributes 3,999 observations, 3,720 of them non-zero.

Access is the cleanest in the reinsurance slice. An unauthenticated GET to sdmx.oecd.org/archive/rest/data/OECD,DF_INSIND/?format=csvfilewithlabels returns the full 4.8 MB labelled CSV, and startPeriod/endPeriod or COU filters subset it server-side. Values arrive as percentages (22,090 observations) or USD (9,470), each flagged with an OBS_STATUS code marking estimated, provisional or break-in-series points.

The limit cuts the opposite way from IRDAI's. INSIND stops at 2022, expresses reinsurance only through the acceptance and retention indicators, and carries no direct ceded-premium series - so the two sources fail in opposite directions. Our INSIND vs IRDAI annual reports comparison breaks that trade-off down line by line.

Yes, and the contrasts show what a modernised IRDAI release could look like. Australia's APRA Statistics Portal indexes 75+ statistical publications and pushes its general insurance databases down to individual authorised general insurers, with history back to December 2002 arriving as XLSX on monthly, quarterly and annual cycles. Quality-scored 8 and refreshed monthly, it is the closest structural cousin to what IRDAI publishes - regulator down to insurer level - except the workbook opens straight into a pivot table instead of a 70 MB PDF.

Set beside those, the IRDAI archive trades convenience for uniqueness. Nothing else in the catalog states the mandatory cession shares and GIC Re placements its tables carry - which is exactly why analysts keep mining the PDFs.

Cession is half the flow; the other half is who accepts it. Lloyd's Market Directory (Brokers, Coverholders, Managing Agents, Syndicates) lists 104 active market-facing syndicates for the 2026 Year of Account as at 5 August 2026, refreshed weekly as HTML plus XLSX, and filters by class and sub-class of business, domicile, company type and - the field that matters most for Indian outward placements - territory authorised to accept business from.

Pricing context comes from the same market's results. Lloyd's Market Financial Performance & Syndicate Reports publishes quarterly KPIs - 2025 closed with GBP 57.9bn gross written premium, an 87.6% combined ratio and GBP 10.6bn profit before tax - alongside individual syndicate reports and accounts back to the year ending 31 December 2014, though Lloyd's disclaims verification of third-party syndicate information.