Top Stories in Property/Casualty

We’ve just published our "Novarica Industry Intelligence Brief for Property and Casualty for January 2015." These reports highlight some of the most interesting industry stories from the past month, and present them along with Novarica commentary. 

Commentary is are available to clients only, but we’ve posted direct links to the stories below:

• Google has been licensed as an insurance agent in 26 states. 
  Full Story.
• David Coons, EVP of executive search firm The Jacobson Group, reports that according to the firm’s research the insurance industry will need to hire
  400,000 people to be fully staffed in 2020.
  Full Story.
• MetLife has had success combining Facebook Custom Audiences with its own behavioral, call center, CRM, and demographic data to identify potential
  prospect segments, and testing what content does and does not work. The insurer has already seen its cost per lead almost cut in half and its lead-to-sale ratio more than double. Full Story.
• Researchers at several universities are piloting the use of FitBits to better predict post-spinal surgery recovery times.
  Full Story – free registration required.
• Progressive has a partnership with OnStar now for UBI, with OnStar offering optional driving assessments to customers along with tips on improving their driving and the option to share their data with Progressive for potential insurance discounts.Full Story.
• A Bain study on P&C carriers found that few carriers are good at both acquiring and retaining customers. Full Story.
• CNA’s building a common enterprise data architecture, including internal and third-party sources of structured and unstructured data, a post-ETL space for data, and a space for integrating particular datasets for analytic processing either via traditional data warehouses or for use in dynamic operational issues not amenable to rules-based processing. Full Story.
  
• 41 states have approved the Verisk Telematics Safety Scoring driver discount program, a behavior-based program that offers a set of analytical tools for telematics and usage-based insurance programs. Full Story.
• Over half of respondents to a Princeton Survey Research Associates International survey of 1,001 American adults would not want to enroll in a
  Pay-As-You-Drive (PAYD) insurance program. Full Story.
  
• A researcher at Digital Bond Labs has found security weaknesses in Xirgo Technologies’ OBDII device, used in Progressive’s Snapshot UBI program.
  Full Story.
  
• Metromile is providing per-mile insurance for Uber drivers now.
  Full Story.

 
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