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Torus, a specialty insurer, and Starr Underwriting Agents Ltd. have entered into an agreement whereby Torus Syndicate 2243 will acquire the renewal rights to CV Starr Syndicate 1919’s continental European marine, casualty and financial lines, and general property business, effective Jan. 1, 2012. Both Torus Syndicate 2243 and CV Starr Syndicate 1919 are managed by Starr Managing Agents Ltd.

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

10 years after the original call for agile business philosophies, where are insurers prevailing and what do they have yet to learn?

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.

McCamish Systems LLC and Pegasystems Inc. have announced a strategic alliance aimed at enhancing McCamish’s life insurance and annuity platform, VPAS Life.

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.

Philadelphia Financial Group Inc. announced will pay $117.5 million for all of the assets of Hartford Life Private Placement LLC (HLPP) from The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc.

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.

Competition and customer expectations leave little room for error when it comes to website performance, and that pressure only increases with customers using mobile platforms.

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.

Aspen U.S. Insurance has entered the recreational marine insurance market, with a focus on marinas, yacht clubs, boat dealers, boat manufacturers and boat component manufacturers.

Aetna, a diversified health care benefits company, launched enhancements to its international website in an effort to customize the user experience and provide mobile capabilities for people on the go.

Micro Focus, a provider of enterprise application modernization testing and management solutions, released Micro Focus Server Enterprise Edition for PL/I. The edition is the first complete, cross-platform migration solution that enables mainframe PL/I applications to be moved, with minimal changes, from an IBM mainframe to Linux, Unix or Windows Server platforms, where they can be operated for a fraction of the cost.

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.