Digital Platforms

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.

CGI Federal Inc., a U.S. subsidiary of Canada-based CGI Group, announced that it has been awarded a $93.7 million contract by The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight (CCIIO) to build the U.S. government’s federal health insurance exchange.

One-third of office-based physicians have a "basic" electronic health records or electronic medical records system, according to preliminary figures from the federal 2011 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey.

Even though they know it’s dangerous and, depending where they are, against the law, drivers continue to text behind the wheel, and Allstate Insurance Co. and Manitoba Public Insurance are doing their part to put an end to it.

Property/casualty insurers may well be relieved that the 2011 Atlantic Hurricane Season officially ended this week. This year, the season counted 19 tropical storms, 7 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes (Category 3 or above on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale) resulting in insurance claims.

Mobile devices and network capabilities will lead growth areas in IT and information management in 2012, with cloud services adoption and enablement not far behind, according to IDC’s annual market predictions.

1. Risk Management/ Climate Control

Life insurers need to craft mitigation strategies for a prolonged low-rate environment.

Fraud is on the rise in the United States and globally, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’s 2011 Global Economic Crime Survey, with cyber crime making the most significant increase in the two years since the firm’s last survey.

Commercial lines carriers focused on risk mitigation tied to business continuity have reason for additional concern. According to a newly published survey, 85 percent of companies reported at least one supply chain disruption over the last 12 months, with 40 percent of analyzed disruption originating below the immediate supplier. The survey, sponsored by Zurich Financial Services Group (Zurich) and conducted by the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) Caversham, United Kingdom, queried companies from across 62 countries.

Glatfelter Insurance Group, a multifaceted insurance broker and MGA/program manager, and SPARTA Insurance Co., a property/casualty carrier dedicated to writing program business with Program Administrators as well as retail agents, share few things in common.

Wolters Kluwer Financial Services has released the latest version of its ARC Logics for Financial Services offering. The enterprise risk management (ERM) solution suite draws upon actionable, industry-specific regulatory intelligence and Wolters Kluwer Financial Services’ domain expertise. Wolters says this helps financial organizations bring transparency, traceability and efficiency to managing compliance, operational and financial risks as well as to the audit function.

Society Insurance, a provider of workers’ compensation insurance, has selected CSC’s comprehensive legal management software, Legal Solutions Suite, as a Software as a Service (SaaS). Society will access the CSC-hosted offering online to improve consistency in legal matter planning and bill review.

A comparison of third-quarter data from 2009, 2010 and 2011 reveals a notable increase in the number of questionable claims submitted, according to a new report issued by the National Insurance Crime Bureau, Des Plaines, Ill. In its third-quarter 2011 questionable claims (QC) referral reason analysis, the Bureau examined six referral reason categories of claims—property, casualty, commercial, workers' compensation, vehicle and miscellaneous—for the quarters listed above.

A recent study of IT spending among small businesses (from $40 million to $350 million in annual revenue) reveals that the budgets will grow slowly. The report—“IT spending and staffing forecast for 2012”— from Computer Economics predicts IT operational budgets should grow about 2.0 percent at the median for small organizations and 0.5 percent for medium ($350 million to $1 billion in revenue) and 0.8 percent for large (revenue of $1 billion or greater) organizations. Growth in the financial services sector, including banks and insurance companies, is weaker than other sectors—health care, professional and technical services, and distribution and manufacturing—but the net trend is still positive.

Aviva Canada Inc., a P&C insurance group, has chosen communic8 as its broker integration hub. The iter8 connectivity hub product will expand its presence within the insurer's IT infrastructure to include uploads from multiple broker management and bridge systems, enabling a one-and-done broker workflow.

It’s no secret that the Green Bay Packers are chasing perfection this season. But what many might not know is that they are quietly leveraging their success to help bring health tips to fourth grade classrooms across the state of Wisconsin.

Foreign insurers are meeting a wall of resistance as they try to penetrate the Chinese market, new analysis from Moody's indicates.

Sponsored by Swiss Re, a new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) finds risk management practices surrounding renewable energy projects wanting.