Distribution

Many insurance companies have been chasing after the people who have a lot of money to invest and protect-high net-worth individuals. But the Principal Financial Group has taken a leap for "the little guy'-middle-class consumers who probably don't have enough life and disability insurance to protect their families."We were getting a steady chant from our advisors that we weren't doing enough to support them at that basic level-selling life insurance and disability protection," says Jerry Patterson, vice president of marketing for the life & health division of The Principal Financial Group.

Conventional management thinking says: Labor is expensive, and automation reduces that expense. Although in many cases this statement is true, competitive advantage in the area of customer service isn't a simple matter of replacing people with technology.

PEARL RIVER, NY--41 states are now accepting the ACORD Life Form Life Application Part 1, ACORD announced. This is a major step in a multi-year initiative and is supported by numerous life insurance companies and associations, including NAILBA and NAVA.

Independent insurance distributors in seven western states now can get accurate Safeco auto and home insurance quotes without leaving their EZLynx Web portal at www.ezlynx.com.

BOSTON--John Hancock Life Insurance Company has quadrupled the long-term care insurance (LTCI) operations professionals who support the sale of its LTCI products from 6 staff members to 24. The expanded support enhances service for its existing LTCI channels including career agents, its national account team, managing general agents (MGAs) and banks, and allows the company to serve two new channels, brokerage general agents (BGAs) and broker-dealers.

BOSTON--The American Insurance Association (AIA) is pushing Congress for a two-year extension of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA), an extension that AIA says will help avoid destabilizing the insurance market and the economy, and will enable policymakers to develop a more permanent solution for managing our nation's economic exposure to catastrophic terrorism.

WELLESLEY HILLS-- Sun Life Financial announced today that its U.S. Group Insurance Division has reorganized its distribution organization into six regions, a new structure necessitated by the rapid expansion of its division and the commitment to provide local service to brokers and customers. To lead operations in these new regions, Sun Life Financial has named four new regional vice presidents (RVPs), to serve alongside two existing RVPs. All six of the RVPs report to Drew Niziak, Vice President, Distribution.

Nationwide Financial is enabling its life agents and distributors to streamline business processes using a Web-based system from NaviSys Inc., Edison, N.J. The system enables Nationwide's distributors and agents--more than 15,000 producers--to use the Web-based tools to propose universal life, variable universal life, term and whole life products to their clients.Nationwide is upgrading its illustration system and will begin using the new system by early fall. Nationwide will also implement in 2005 another component of the NaviSys suite, a Web-based electronic application that uses reflexive questioning to capture the information required for underwriting and policy issue. The application automatically accepts data from the illustration system, so representatives will need to enter customer data only once.

Cyber Security Industry Alliance (CSIA), a Washington, D.C.-based CEO public policy and advocacy group composed of security software, hardware and service vendors to address key cyber security issues, has released its recommendations for the development of a secure electronic health care system.These recommendations are designed to support the nation's first strategic framework report on a 10-year initiative to develop electronic health records and other uses of health information technology, which was announced today by Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tommy G. Thompson and David J. Brailer, M.D., Ph. D., the National Health Information Technology Coordinator.

Safeco today announced strong second-quarter results, reflecting the company's solid underwriting and the competitive strength of its automated sales platform. In addition, weather-related catastrophe losses were relatively light for the second quarter. The company posted net income of $247.5 million -- or $1.77 per diluted share. This represents an increase over second-quarter 2003 net income, which was $111.9 million--or $0.81 per diluted share.