The reinsurer pays against the bordereaux. Every row has to reconcile to the treaty.
A cedant recovers from its reinsurer by producing documentation — the bordereaux of premiums and claims, reconciled against the treaty terms. When a row does not match the treaty, or a recovery cannot be evidenced, the leakage is the cedant's, and the dispute is with a counterparty it depends on.
Reinsurance is how an insurer carries risk larger than its own balance sheet, and in Africa it runs through a handful of major carriers — Africa Re, ZEP-RE, and the continental and national reinsurers — under treaties that define what is ceded and on what terms. Under a proportional treaty the cedant and reinsurer share premiums and losses in a set ratio, with the reinsurer paying a ceding commission; under a non-proportional treaty the reinsurer covers losses above an attachment point. In both, the accounting runs on bordereaux — the periodic schedules of premiums and claims the cedant produces — and the recovery the cedant receives is only as good as the documentation behind it.
The work of producing that documentation is where the leakage lives. A cedant's bordereaux must be reconciled, row by row, against the treaty terms — the right cession rate, the correct attachment point, the reinstatement premium, the currency conversion — and the schedules arrive and depart in inconsistent formats across multiple treaties and reinsurers. Industry estimates put reinsurance leakage at around two and a half per cent of gross written premium; for a cedant writing fifty million dollars, that is well over a million dollars a year in recoveries never claimed, lost to wrong cession rates, missed reinstatements, and currency errors that compound quietly for months.
The documentation also has to satisfy more than the reinsurer. Under IFRS 17, reinsurance contracts held are measured and disclosed in their own right, and the cedant's auditors test the cessions and recoveries. The insurance regulators — Kenya's authority, Nigeria's commission, South Africa's prudential authority — require reinsurance arrangements to be reported in specified formats and on fixed timelines. A bordereaux is therefore not merely a bill to a counterparty; it is an accounting and regulatory artefact, and a recovery the cedant cannot trace to the treaty and the underlying claims is one it can neither book with confidence nor defend in an audit.
The cross-border dimension is growing and adds its own complexity. As the African Continental Free Trade Area opens regional cession and Nigeria's reform lifts the reinsurer capital requirement to thirty-five billion naira, more risk is ceded across borders and across currencies, and a bordereaux that reconciles in one currency at one date must still hold when translated and consolidated at another. Currency errors that compound silently are among the largest single sources of leakage, and they stay invisible until a reserve review or a renewal surfaces them. The reconciliation that survives is the one that holds its lineage through the translation, not only within a single ledger.
The temptation with AI is to let a model read the treaties and the claims and produce the reconciliation and the recovery figure. The danger is the one that runs through every governed workflow in this hub: a recovery in a financial statement that cannot be traced back to the treaty clause and the claim record underneath it is worse than no figure, because it undermines the credibility of the cessions accounting as a whole and the auditor's confidence with it. The reconciliation has to be reasoned and traceable, not generated.
And the relationship matters as much as the number. A reinsurer is a long-term partner the cedant will return to at every renewal, and disputes over what the treaty covers and what the bordereaux supports are expensive, slow, and corrosive to a relationship the cedant cannot easily replace. A cedant that presents recoveries traceable to the treaty and the claims, every row evidenced, resolves more disputes before they harden — and renews on better terms than one whose documentation the reinsurer has learned to distrust.
At the reinsurer, and at the auditor, a recovery total is worth nothing. A recovery that traces, row by row, to the treaty and the claim is worth everything.
Where each sits.
Akki holds the treaties, the policy and claims records, and the bordereaux as a governed substrate, with the lineage of every ceded premium and recovered claim preserved. Rather than a reconciliation assembled by hand in spreadsheets and discarded after the cycle, the matching of each row to its treaty term is inspectable and reproducible — which is exactly what an IFRS 17 audit and a reinsurer's query both require.
Solva reasons over the bordereaux against the treaty and drafts the cedant's reconciliation and recovery position, with each recovery traceable to the treaty clause and the claim behind it. Where a recovery cannot be evidenced — where the records do not support the cession rate, the attachment, or the reinstatement claimed — Solva declines to assert it rather than booking a figure that will not survive the auditor or the reinsurer. The discipline that looks like caution is what closes the leakage and wins the dispute.
Reinsurance bordereaux are largely commercial and aggregate data, so SyniSense does less here than in pricing or fraud. Where claims-level cessions carry policyholder or health detail — in life and health treaties especially — and that detail crosses to an offshore reinsurer or retrocessionaire, SyniSense keeps the identifiable element inside the perimeter while the aggregate the reinsurer needs is shared. For ordinary proportional treaty accounting, the weight sits with Akki and Solva.
For the cessions manager, reconciliation stops being a heroic, error-prone effort that lives in spreadsheets and leaks recoveries. Each row is matched to its treaty term with the basis attached, so the team works the genuinely disputed cessions rather than rebuilding the comparison every cycle, and the recoveries that were quietly lost to wrong rates and missed reinstatements are captured.
In a dispute, the cedant's position arrives at the reinsurer already evidenced. A recovery that traces to the treaty and the claim is a position to negotiate from, not a total the cedant then has to justify — which resolves more disputes before they reach the point of straining the relationship.
For the auditor and the regulator, the cessions accounting is defensible by construction. Under IFRS 17 and the reinsurance reporting rules, each recovery carries its lineage, so a query is answered by showing the derivation rather than launching a reconstruction — and the figure that cannot be evidenced is surfaced before it reaches the financial statements rather than after.
For the relationship with the reinsurer, a reconciliation both sides can inspect lowers the temperature at every renewal. The cedant that documents its recoveries cleanly is the one the reinsurer trusts, prices better, and renews with — which, over the life of a treaty programme, is worth more than any single recovery.
For the finance function, the recoveries become bookable with confidence. A recovery traceable to the treaty and the claim is one the cedant can recognise without the quiet reserve against uncertainty that untraceable recoveries always carry — which tightens the cessions accounting the auditor and the regulator both rely on.