THE country’s nonlife insurers are convinced they can operate profitably in an environment where there is regional competition but without having to require them to dip into their pockets for more capital as the government has insisted.

According to the Philippine Insurers and Reinsurers Association or Pira, the homegrown nonlife insurers can very well handle the anticipated increased competition seen by 2015 when insurers across Asia are permitted to operate anywhere they like.

More important, Pira operations should remain very profitable even if its members remain essentially mom-and-pop operators instead of the insurance supermarkets the government has envisioned and laid out for them in just a few more years.

“We believe that as there are supermarkets in this world, there are also mom-and-pop grocers that cater to the needs of certain sectors,” the association said in a statement sent by e-mail on Sunday.

Pira has repeatedly bucked the phased increase in capital for all insurers in the country on the belief that while some do make more money by upsizing their capital, those who choose to remain where they are can be just as profitable.

According to the association, its members have just increased their capital to P125 million as mandated and unless the government agrees to stop the phased increases and pursue instead a risk-based approach to the issue, then there could be problems as the minimum capital reaches P500 million by 2015.

Pira insisted the risk-based approach should work best for an industry where capital is tied directly to the volume of risk they take rather than to regulation-driven capital applied across the board regardless of the risks individually taken.

Pira is pushing for a risk-based capital framework in which the amount of capital required is commensurate to the amount of risk the company is willing to take, the umbrella organization reiterated.

This developed as Pira reported premium payments having grown by 8.5 percent in 2010, helping the industry to post aggregate net income totaling P3.6 billion.

According to Pira, their aggregate net income last year was 63 percent higher than in 2009 and the result of an 11.4-percent rise in motor vehicle-insurance premium totaling P13.5 billion.

For buildings, the premiums for fire and allied perils, which include typhoon and flood, also grew to P18.5 billion, an increase of 5 percent from the previous year.

These increases were traced to increased awareness of insurance among property owners after the historic flooding caused by tropical storm Ondoy in September 2009 when substantially more than P10 billion worth of property damage as reported.