The most popular articles and news offered by Carrier Management.
Top Content
Allstate, Nationwide Post Dramatic Q12024 Homeowners Loss Ratio Drops: S&P GMI
In the topsy-turvy world of homeowners insurance, first-quarter loss ratios have been bouncing around for the last five years—from below 50 in 2020 to over 70 in 2021 and 2023, a new analysis ...
U.S. P/C Insurers Post Best Q1 Underwriting Result in 17 Years
Even though direct loss ratios for commercial auto and other liability lines rose in first-quarter 2024, across all lines U.S. property/casualty insurers posted a net combined ratio of 94—the best ...
Commercial Lines Not at Top of Cycle; ‘Thieves’ Fuel Social Inflation: CEOs
It's not waning market discipline but the scourge of social inflation that industry leaders of commercial lines insurance businesses see as a potential threat to future profits, a trio of ...
PFAS by the Numbers: $165B Ground-Up* Litigation Losses Possible
When Frank Demento received a mailing from managers of his water district on Long Island last year, the news it contained seemed pretty good.
State Farm Underwriting Loss Climbs to $14B
When State Farm reported a $13 billion underwriting loss for 2022, it was the largest in the auto insurance giant's history. A year later, and another record. The underwriting loss figure climbed to ...
Brazen $30M Los Angeles Cash Heist Explained
A brazen Los Angeles cash heist on Easter weekend in which thieves cracked a safe and got away with as much as $30 million is believed to be one of the largest such heists in U.S. history. The heist ...
More Companies Ditch Hot Desking for Giving Workers Their Own Space
To get workers back to the office, bosses have dangled fancy coffee, yoga classes and DJ parties. But that still hasn't been enough, so some firms are giving employees a ...
GEICO’s ‘Eye-Popping’ 2023 Insurance Profits, Falling Employee Counts
Even though Berkshire Hathaway's latest annual report featured Warren Buffett's forecast that the days of "eye-popping performance" for the giant conglomerate are over, readers focused on ...
Commercial Auto Insurance Profit Struggles Continue
The commercial auto insurance segment maintained its place as a weaker-performing U.S. property/casualty insurance product line in 2023. Despite successive periods of ...
Study: MGA Market Still Growing
A hard market combined with underwriting capacity from fronting companies allowed for robust growth in the MGA market in 2023, according to a new Conning strategic study. The global investment ...
What Role Does Insurance Play in a Politically Charged Climate?
Law enforcement officials are continuing to investigate a July 13 shooting at a Butler, Pa. rally for former President Donald Trump's 2024 election campaign. During the incident, the former president ...
Personal Auto Driving P/C Insurers to 2024 Underwriting Profit
S&P Global Market Intelligence is forecasting a combined ratio of 99.2 for the U.S. P/C insurance industry overall in 2024, signifying a return to underwriting profitability for the first time ...
GEICO Tops Progressive With Higher J.D. Power Scores
Although Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett and Ajit Jain told investors last month that GEICO is playing catch-up with Progressive to improve technology and connect rate to risk, Berkshire's ...
Judgment Day
In May 2022, a judge at the U.S. District Court in Texas ruled that IBM had breached a 2015 licensing agreement signed with a competitor, BMC Software Inc., awarding BMC ...
Sorry, Wrong ZIP Code: Regulators Move Forward With California Reforms
Why isn't my ZIP code on the map? Questions along those lines emerged at a public hearing hosted by the California Department of Insurance last week when CDI sought comments on proposed regulatory ...
Tesla Blasts Off to Top P/C Insurance Growers Chart
While personal lines insurers reported double-digit rates of direct premiums written growth in 2023, some relative newcomers to the segment—including Tesla Insurance—saw triple-digit leaps ...
CEO Viewpoints: On Michigan, California and Litigation ‘Leeches’
"Michigan—not so great." The easy-to-overlook observation about insurance risk, delivered by Elizabeth Heck, chief executive officer of Greater New York Insurance Companies, during a panel ...
Report: Insurers Keen on Replacing Legacy Systems Seek More Agility
Insurance companies are replacing or augmenting legacy systems in search of product innovation and technology integration, according to a new Information Services Group (ISG) Provider Lens Insurance ...
Middle Manager Is the Middle Child
The middle child breaks up fights, mediates disputes, and smooths the differences between older and younger siblings. They carry the weight of family responsibilities and ...
Transactional vs. Transformational Leaders
Most insurance organizations are run by left-brain, rational, transactional leaders. Many are actuaries, underwriters, lawyers and former business line leaders. And that ...
Avoid Employee Turnover by Asking 5 Simple Questions
As an executive coach, I have observed the rise and fall of many leaders over the years. One thing I can say with certainty is that good leaders show interest in their ...
U.S. P/C Industry Underwriting Loss Reaches 10-Year High: AM Best
AM Best published its annual estimate of the U.S. property/casualty insurance industry's financial results yesterday, reporting that $38 billion of underwriting losses for 2023 was a 10-year high for ...
QBE to Non-Renew $500M of North American Mid-Market Biz
QBE announced that it will start shutting down the middle-market segment in North America to focus on North American businesses where it has more meaningful market position, relevance and scale. ...
Insurance Middle Managers Speak Out
Often forgotten and overlooked when business is humming, the middle manager is typically the first to go when companies, including P/C insurers, decide to downsize. In a related article, "Middle ...
Inflation a Blessing for Root: Q1 Profit Is Proof Point of Data Science Strategy
There was a moment in first-quarter 2021 when InsurTech Root met a long-desired loss ratio target, sending a promising signal that the cash-burning startup was squarely ...
How to Outperform: Don’t Outsource Underwriting; Manage Cycles
Executives of two property/casualty insurance organizations—Kinsale Insurance and the U.S. P/C operations of Arch Capital—shared their recipes for success with an analyst who crowned their ...
Put Motivation Back Into Performance Reviews
It's time to update the traditional performance review, which focuses largely on how the employee performed the prior year and whether they met agreed-upon goals and ...
Berkshire’s ‘Most Important’ Biz Drives Q1 Results; GEICO Still Behind on Tech
Berkshire Hathaway continued to deliver eye-popping results for its insurance and reinsurance operations during the first quarter of 2024, with underwriting profits for personal auto insurer GEICO ...
Defendants, Insurers Risk Falling Behind on AI for Litigation
As generative artificial intelligence drives the innovation of legal tools, insurance defense experts are wary that failing to keep up with the plaintiffs' bar's ...
Liability Reinsurance Crisis Could Be Looming, CEO Says
"There could be a liability crisis in reinsurance in a couple of years," a reinsurance executive predicted this week. Ken Brandt, chair, president and chief executive officer of TransRe, offered the ...
S&P GMI Performance Rankings: E&S Insurer Kinsale Takes Top Spot
A hard market, resilient domestic macroeconomic conditions and strong underwriting results have elevated specialty commercial carriers to the top of S&P Global Market ...
Thanks to AI, Industry Will Soon See Big Jump in Parametric Insurance, Consultant Says
Insurance agents must now embrace the use of artificial intelligence, but they won't be replaced by it. And the use of parametric policies will soon increase sharply across property insurance lines ...
P/C Premium Growth Likely But Profits Delayed Until 2025: Forecast
Favorable first-quarter economic and underwriting results for property/casualty insurance are in line with projections that the industry will see a small underwriting loss in 2024 and achieve ...
California’s New Daylighting Law Aims to Improve Pedestrian, Vehicle Safety
A new California law that became effective January 1st aims to improve the visibility of both vehicles and pedestrians in an effort to improve safety for both, according to the San Francisco ...
Change Management Best Practices for P/C Insurers
In the property/casualty insurance industry, AI's ability to analyze vast datasets to evaluate risk is a game-changer. It enables insurers to price policies more ...
AM Best: U.S. P/C Industry Suffered Second Straight Year of $20B+ Underwriting Losses in 2023
Unprofitable results in the U.S. private passenger auto and homeowners/farmowners market insurance segments led to a second straight year of net underwriting losses in the property/casualty industry ...
J.D. Power UBI Scores vs. Overall 2024 U.S. Auto Insurance Satisfaction Scores
Anyone comparing results of the J.D. Power 2024 U.S. Auto Insurance Study with prior editions, like the one in 2023, will notice that scores dropped by nearly 200 points—to an average of about 646 ...
Deflating Social Inflation
Prior-year loss reserve charges. Social inflation. Nuclear verdicts.
Those topics, featured in various articles in Carrier Management's ...
Study Examines How Climate, Land Condition Impact Tornado Formation
Scientists are looking at the big picture of what causes severe storms and tornadoes -- and what dictates where they occur. Dan Chavas, an associate professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, ...
What Happened to Reinsurance ‘Class of 2023’? Hard Market Defies Age-Old Patterns.
Catastrophic events, such as major hurricanes and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, traditionally have led to hard markets that in turn drove the formation of startup reinsurers to fill capacity needs. ...
State Farm Seeks Large California Rate Hikes; CDI To Probe Financial State
State Farm has applied for large rate increases in California, a year after the carrier got rate approvals of 7 percent and 20 percent—adding fuel to a burning homeowners crisis in a state that's ...
Surplus Lines Insurers Providing a Much-Needed Safety Valve for P/C Industry
Given the difficult environment for primary property/casualty carriers, the efficient use of excess and surplus (E&S) lines capacity is providing a safety valve for ...
Hard Market Conditions Expected to Ease in 2025 as Claims Inflation Softens: Swiss Re
Hard market conditions in the global non-life insurance sector will continue this year but will begin to ease in 2025, as general inflation and claims inflation conditions soften, according to Swiss ...
AI Large Language Models Not Leaving Chubb’s Greenberg ‘Breathless’
Revealing that Chubb has its own version of ChatGPT and an app store that delivers copilots to different functions of the company, CEO Evan Greenberg said he recognizes the power of AI—but he's ...
Social Inflation Fix: Insurers Can’t Be Out Front, Chubb’s Greenberg Says
Although insurers can help to stop the growth of social inflation, they can't lead the effort, an industry executive said during an insurance conference this week. Evan Greenberg, chair and chief ...
Study Finds Link Between Mass Layoffs and Data Breaches
A new study suggests there may be a correlation between mass layoffs and data breaches. According to a research team led by faculty from Binghamton University, State University of New York, since ...
Beryl Lands in Texas; Record Storm Spawns ‘Early Warning’ for Insurers
Although Beryl was still a tropical storm on Sunday, late day National Hurricane Center advisories put it on track to make landfall on the middle Texas coast early Monday, possibly regaining strength ...
P/C Insurer CFO Viewpoints on PFAS
PFAS was a hot topic at the recent Casualty Actuarial Society Seminar on Reinsurance in June. But at a separate meeting held around the same time—the S&P Global ...
Lemonade Exec: AI Getting the Right Claims to the Right Adjuster
AI Jim, the chatbot that handles claims for InsurTech Lemonade, is renowned for its ability to handle claims in seconds. Two seconds to be exact. That was the time it took the chatbot to settle a ...
Investing in Climate Resilience Really Pays Off: Study
Weather-related catastrophes are increasing in frequency and intensity, and billion-dollar disasters are becoming the norm. The U.S. averages about 10 disasters costing ...