Where the moment-generating function is finite in a neighborhood of zero, define the cumulant-generating function and the th cumulant by . Differentiation gives
since . Thus the first two cumulants are the mean and variance.
Conditional on , independence gives . Summing over the Poisson distribution yields
Hence the compound Poisson cumulants give
For the moment statements, finite second moments suffice even when a moment-generating function does not exist near zero: conditioning gives . This distinguishes the raw second moment from the variance of an individual claim.
For a single flood, the law of total expectation and law of total variance similarly give
Condition on the number of floods and apply the same laws once more. All floods have these moments and are independent of , so the annual total satisfies
The additional term is the variation in the number of entire flood clusters; it would be lost by treating individual claims as an ordinary Poisson stream.
For the annual count , its probability generating function is
This is the nested Poisson flood count. Differentiating, or conditioning on , gives and . Thus is not Poisson when , since its variance exceeds its mean. If either parameter is zero it is identically zero, a degenerate Poisson distribution.
Let be the number of valid claims in flood . Independent validity marking gives . Its generating function is
so Poisson thinning gives . With validity independent also of claim amount, each claim contributes expected paid amount . Therefore the annual expected payment is . The independent-mark assumption is needed for this multiplication; a size-dependent invalidity rule would require the joint expected value of amount and validity instead.