Digital Platforms

Insurers are skeptical about the cloud, but new developments could lend hope to a secure future.

Priority Data has added four township mutual partners in Minnesota. In October, Priority Data launched Farm and Home quoting for North Branch Mutual. The company says it also has signed agreements with Sverdrup Mutual, Madelia-Lake Crystal Mutual, and Has San Lake Mutual to launch quoting, rating and underwriting solutions in the first quarter of 2012.

With the stroke of a pen on Saturday, President Obama signed a continuing resolution that bought the troubled National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) another week of funding.

As the rulemaking phase of the Dodd-Frank Act continues, insurers are looking to shape the rules to determine which companies constitute a systemic risk to the larger economy.

Regardless of external factors, companies engaging in M&A activity generally outperform the Global MSCI Index by 2.9 percent based on year-to-date statistics from 2011.

The insurance industry experienced decent top-line growth, fairly resilient margins and increased capital management in 2011. Keefe, Bruyette & Woods expects it to continue into 2012 and stocks will be traded more in line with fundamentals next year.

GlobalOptions will serve as the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) provider to Argo Group US Inc., an international underwriter of specialty insurance and reinsurance products to P&C markets, and its subsidiaries.

JEVCO Insurance Co., a specialty insurer, is in production with ClaimCenter, the claims management solution from Guidewire Software, a provider of core system software to P&C insurers.

Talend, an open-source software company, says BF&M Insurance, a Bermuda insurance group, has added ESB Enterprise Edition to its portfolio of Talend integration solutions.

The Property Casualty Insurers Association of America (PCI) responded to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) call for a national ban on the use of cell phones while driving by commending the attention being given to the issue of distracted driving. The association also asserts the fact that cell phones are only one source of distraction for American drivers.

Swiss Re predicts that 2011 will rank as the most expensive year ever for the insurance industry. The insurer's sigma team estimates total insured losses for the global industry from natural catastrophes and man-made disasters will reach $108 billion. This is more than double 2010’s losses, which were $48 billion.

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) may be heading for another lapse, subsumed in high-stakes political brinkmanship.

A report issued by the consumer group Center for Justice and Democracy at New York Law School claims that carriers are planning to price-gouge buyers of insurance, particularly commercial lines insureds. The report, “Repeat Offenders: How the Insurance Industry Manufactures Crises and Harms America,” asserts that insurers are in collusion to create a hard market in which commercial lines insurers can target their customers with large rate increases.

After looking at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's 2012 Top Safety Pick list—the longest ever at 115—it’s clear that automakers have made vast design improvements during the past year. Sixty-nine cars, 38 SUVs, five minivans and three pickups earn the designation for 2012. Eighteen of the recipients—10 of which are Honda/Acura models—are new to the winner’s circle. And again this year, every major automaker has at least one winner. At 15, Toyota/Lexus/Scion has the most winners for 2012, followed by General Motors with 14, Volkswagen/Audi with 13, and Ford/Lincoln and Honda/Acura each with 12.

Credit and information management firm TransUnion released end of third-quarter results of its proprietary Auto Insurance Risk Index, noting a slight increase of 0.03 percent after four consecutive quarterly declines. The index now registers 98.85, three basis points higher than Q2 2011; 31 basis points lower than a year ago at this time; and 73 basis points lower than its recessionary peak in Q2 2009.

Emergency Physicians Insurance Company RRG (EPIC) and Echo Ridge Partners have implemented iCatalyst, a policy and claims management system designed to streamline processes and improve customer service throughout an entire policy lifecycle.

From a catastrophe-loss standpoint, 2011 is more likely to be remembered for the variety and frequency of loss events rather than a singular catastrophe.

Professional insurance agents have what insurance customers are looking for, according to research results issued by the PIA Partnership. The PIA Partnership is a group of insurance companies that works collaboratively with PIA National to conduct research and develop tools and resources designed to benefit professional independent insurance agents. PIA is a national trade association that represents member insurance agents and employees who sell and service all kinds of insurance.

Amica Mutual received the top honor for overall excellence from InsuranceQuotes.com’s inaugural Insurance Quality Awards.

The insurance industry showed strong support for The National Transportation Safety Board after it announced yesterday that it recommends all 50 states and the District of Columbia pass legislation banning the non-emergency use of portable electronic devices by motorists while driving.

The National Transportation Safety Board said today that texting, emailing or using a cell phone while driving has been proven to be too dangerous to be allowed anywhere, and recommends that all states impose a total ban, except for emergencies. The recommendation would also apply to hands-free devices, the federal safety board said.

On the heels of reports coming out of Washington on the government’s scramble to protect the country’s power grid from cybercriminals, CSC reports the launch of an Insurance Cybersecurity Advisory Council for life insurance and annuity providers and property/casualty insurers. The goal of the council is to facilitate the development of best practices and technology strategies that effectively mitigate the risk of cyber attacks on the insurance industry.

The International Underwriting Association has established an enhanced lobbying presence in the Americas, the group reports.

More evidence of a hardening market has arrived via the most recent Commercial Lines Insurance Pricing Survey (CLIPS) from Towers Watson.

For the second straight year, MetLife leads life insurers in annuity considerations through the first three quarters, ended Sept. 30, 2011. Prudential Financial and Jackson National Life Group round out the top three in the rankings released by SNL.

According to data from ACSI LLC, P&C insurers are improving customer satisfaction, while life insurers are steady and health insurers are slightly declining. For its American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), ACSI annually conducts interviews with approximately 70,000 consumers and plugs the information into an econometric model to measure satisfaction with a wide range of industries, products and large companies. The results are released on a monthly basis, with all measures reported using a scale of 0 to 100, and this month it was the insurance industry’s turn.

Risks continue to outweigh the benefits when it comes to implementing technologies of convenience behind the wheel.

United Automobile Insurance Co. (UAIC), a privately held P&C insurer specializing in auto insurance, has deployed BillingCenter as its billing management system. BillingCenter is a product of Guidewire Software, a provider of core system software to P&C insurers.

While the insurance industry was an early adopter of mobile technology for basic communication functions, it has lagged in developing and implementing internal and customer-facing applications.

Rising rates in some market segments is attributing to a newly bullish outlook on the financial prospects of insurers.

Given the tough pricing environment, skittish capital markets and litany of catastrophe losses seen in 2011, it’s hard to regard the present as a golden age for reinsurers.

The industry constantly hears about the problem of retiring knowledge workers and that young people aren’t drawn to insurance careers. The Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of New York (IIABNY) is doing something about it. On December 7 the association hosted more than 50 high school students who participated in InVEST, an insurance industry classroom-to-career education program.

Experts say thanks to a dearth of Federal support, it isn’t a stretch to imagine a power grid cyber attack that takes out the Internet, grinding communications and businesses to a halt in the process.

Columbus Life Insurance, a provider of retirement, estate planning and advanced business planning services, has selected iGO e-App to automate and streamline business processes for independent producers. iGO is a product of iPipeline, a creator of marketing, selling and processing solutions for insurance carriers, distributors and producers.

While insurance products are inherently complex, interacting with insurance companies should not be.

ingenie is a new online car insurance brand targeting young drivers in the United Kingdom, aged 17 to 25, who have been priced off the road by rocketing car insurance costs. Those costs have seen the 17 to 22 age bracket now paying a typical annual premium of £2,431 ($3,805), up 64 percent when compared to 2010 figures.

COUNTRY Financial, out of Bloomington, Ill., has licensed the PolicyWriter software suite from Adaptik Corp. to serve as the heart of its next generation personal lines policy administration platform, the companies report.

With another expiration of funding for the National Flood Insurance Program looming, a continuing resolution to keep the program afloat has passed the Senate by unanimous consent.

Warm weather offers favorable conditions for car thieves, while holidays and cold weather bode well for potential victims, according to a new report from the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB).

Despite high levels of unemployment, U.S. business leaders say one of the biggest risks they’re facing is a talent and skills shortage, according to the 2011 Lloyd’s Risk Index.

As an IT solution for complex integration, service-oriented architecture (SOA) has seen success in some insurers’ organizations. However, from a business and architecture perspective, it leaves more to be desired, according to a new report issued today by Boston-based research and consulting firm Celent.

In 2012, the U.S. life and annuity insurance industry will be challenged to find ways to manage both capital and risk in an economically and politically uncertain year, while continuing to lay the groundwork for future growth, according to Ernst & Young's new Global Insurance Center U.S. Outlook report.

Insurers in Britain may have a new data set to consider in their predictive analytics endeavors: the increase in claims due to personal lines property/casualty policyholders’ “do-it-yourself” (DIY) home improvements.

American Fidelity Assurance Co. has chosen Wolters Kluwer Financial Services’ NILS INsource and NILS INcompass offerings to help monitor and implement regulatory changes.

Last decade, car crashes were the leading cause of teen deaths, with 16-year-old drivers possessing crash rates two times greater than 18-to-19-year-old drivers and four times that of older drivers. But Allstate and the National Safety Council think they know how to cut into the 81,000 fatalities resulting from crashes involving teen drivers between 2000 and 2009, claiming in a new report that nationwide GDL laws have the potential to prevent over 2,000 such deaths and save $13.6 billion annually.

The soft pricing that has defined the property/casualty market for years may finally be ebbing.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has issued a final rule to make available standardized extracts of Medicare claims data to facilitate measuring the performance of providers and suppliers. The rule has significant changes that enable use of clinical data along with the claims data.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has published a final rule, with a comment period, establishing health insurers' "medical loss ratios," including provisions to account for ICD-10 conversion costs.

As a teetering Euro threatens more disruption in world financial markets, a new survey reveals widespread concern among those responsible for risk management at U.K.-based insurance companies.

Would customers react less negatively if their insurance company informed them about rate hikes personally over the phone versus a written letter? A new white paper by The Forum: Business Results Through People suggests that customers are less inclined to perceive a business negatively if price increases are communicated in-person, over the phone rather than through the mail.

Having suffered five of the top ten deadliest natural disasters in history, with recent events affecting over 70 percent of its land area and more than half its population, China presents ongoing challenges to the insurance market. According to a new market report released by Aon Benfield, the global reinsurance intermediary of Aon Corp., these and other challenges are complex and amplified by the scale of the market and the speed of its development.

A.M. Best's recent catastrophe-related loss estimates reveal a bad first nine months of 2011 for U.S. P&C insurers. According to the agency's briefing “U.S. Property/Casualty Catastrophe Losses Climb to $38.6 Billion for the First Nine Months of 2011,” the estimated total net pretax accident-year catastrophe-related losses were $38.6 billion, up $22.5 billion (140 percent), from an estimated $16.1 billion reported during the same period a year ago.