Security risk

Social media outlets are hot marketing tools—and dangerous security risks. What’s an insurer to do?

As the number of claims mount, insurers are in a scramble to manage risk management issues surrounding property/casualty coverage of faulty Chinese drywall. Yesterday, Louisiana became the first state to openly challenge insurers, passing a bill stopping insurers from increasing premiums or canceling homeowners and commercial property coverage because of such claims.

The Qatar-based reinsurer signed a three-year contract with RMS to manage earthquake risk in Asia.

Although efforts are underway to harmonize certain areas of insurance regulation, such as solvency margins and the regulation of control and management, until there is overall harmonization of international insurance laws, sellers, producers and buyers of multinational programs face certain challenges. So says Suresh Krishnan, general counsel, Multinational Client Group at the ACE Group of insurance and reinsurance companies, in a new report. The challenges, says Krishnan, involve making sure companies are not inadvertently assuming risks under local insurance and tax laws in the various jurisdictions implicated by their programs.

Perhaps this isn't surprising, as smaller firms have a lot more to lose if they have fraudulent accounts in their midst.

The National Flood Insurance program, which has limped along on a series of temporary extensions, may be due for a more substantial resolution.

Recovering equity markets may foretell consolidation in the insurance industry, a new report says

A dialogue is necessary to identify emerging risks and help risk managers achieve full value from their ERM investments, says RIMS report.

A.M. Best revises State Farm General Insurance’s outlook to positive from stable, S&P places Reserve National Insurance on CreditWatch with negative implications.

Steering a car with one’s eyes seems like a neat idea ... until you look the wrong way.

Prakash Shimpi will oversee the enterprisewide risk monitoring and management program for ING's U.S. insurance operations.

The two companies announced a partnership to couple DocuSign’s signature technology with iPipeline’s e-Policy Solution.

Narragansett Bay Insurance’s CIO offers tips for insurers on how to best leverage the cloud while minimizing risks.

The advisory organization says this is the industry's first standardized plan for rating homeowners insurance by individual perils.

With the health care debate receding, President Obama has stepped up his efforts to aid passage of comprehensive financial services regulatory reform. While most of the reform measures are aimed squarely at banks, the breadth of the proposed reforms may well encompass many activities currently performed by insurers. Indeed, while insurers may have avoided the purview of a proposed consumer financial products regulator, the issue of whether large insurers will have to help fund a bailout mechanism for systemically risky institutions remains an open question.

Planned acquisition of compliance specialist firm will pay dividends in an industry sharply focused on complying.

Industry weighs in as legislators seek long-term fix to the troubled National Flood Insurance Plan.

While mainframes are still both viable and valuable, perhaps the key to this semantic pretzel is that the needs of the business must come first, and executives shouldn’t rush to adopt new systems simply because they're the latest-and-greatest new tech.

Pharmacists Mutual pointed to the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak as the catalyst for seeking a unified communications system.

RiskRover records addresses and GPS coordinates, takes photographs and translates the info into risk models all on a mobile device.