Editorial - Next time you're paying your ratings agency, add a large tip!

(From Reinsurance)

Byline: Mark Geoghegan, editor, mark.geoghegan@incisivemedia.com.

Dear Friend,

It is foolish to try to achieve greatness, so it usually takes a special kind of fool to succeed at achieving something great. Welcome to the foolish world of magazine journalism!

Our annual trawl through the financial entrails of the industry to produce the much-vaunted top 50 reinsurers' list must be the crowning glory of folly. I mean, just who do we think we are? Are we a ratings agency with armies of Ivy League interns? No. Do we have banks of supercomputers humming and whirring in vast cathedral-like data centres, running infinite combinations of numbers through government-sized databases? Certainly not! But we do have excellent internet connections, an online questionnaire-building tool and the latest version of Excel - not to mention the magic ingredients of of foolhardiness, foolishness and naivety in abundance.

Why is it that we journalists are so foolish, then? Why do we think we can compile the first list of reinsurers using 2005 data when no ratings agency dares to attempt such a feat for a couple of months, and no other magazine will do so until 2007? It's the prize, the race to be first, that inspires us to greatness.

Every year we kid ourselves that the task is going to be easier - hopelessly optimistic phrases like "we'll get them to do it online" or "we'll simplify the whole process and just ask for one or two key pieces of data" ring around meeting rooms. And then, rather like amateur mountaineers watching a Himalayan peak appearing as the clouds part, we encounter the hard rock of reality with a gut-wrenching bump, accompanied by a hideous sinking feeling as the enormity of the task becomes manifest.