Growing API Economy in Insurance  May 30th 2023

Growing API Economy in Insurance

This article is part of The Future of Insurance -LinkedIn's Newsletter Series.

Click on "subscribe" button to get updates on future of insurance, technology, customer & employee experience, and industry trends! The insurance industry has experienced a significant shift towards digitalization

Dogan Kaleli, CEO at Stere, Founder at Nion, Ex-Allianz, LinkedIn Creator

State Farm Ceases Writing New Business in CA for All Business and Personal Insurance

State Farm General Insurance Company®, State Farm’s provider of homeowners insurance in California, will cease accepting new applications including all business and personal lines property and casualty insurance, effective May 27, 2023.

This decision does not impact personal auto insurance. *State Farm General Insurance Company made this decision due to historic increases in construction costs outpacing inflation, rapidly growing catastrophe exposure, and a challenging reinsurance market.

"We take seriously our responsibility to manage risk"

Memorial Day travel forecast up 7% YOY, claims likely to return to ‘near-normal’ volume

AAA projects 42.3 million Americans will travel 50 miles or more from home this Memorial Day weekend, a 7% increase over 2022, while CCC Intelligent Solutions predicts the number of collision claims will return to near-normal volume.

“Memorial Day-related claims activity has followed a similar pattern to overall claims activity the last several years, with pandemic-related dips in claims volume in 2020 and 2021 and a return to near-normal claims activity in 2022,” said CCC Intelligent Solutions Product Marketing Vice President Jason Verlen. “Given the claims trend line and predictions for a high volume of travelers this Memorial Day weekend, CCC would expect to see claims at the 2022 level, and potentially beyond, following the upcoming holiday weekend.”

'Intelligent Ingestion': Time to Truly Go Digital

The industry kids itself about having gone paperless. In fact, we still use the same processes we used in the 17th century. It's time for a change.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• A typical process involves routing the submission to a lower-cost resource, often offshore, who might extract and convert 50 of the 500 important pieces of information in it into digital data.
• But tools that combine natural language processing with computer vision can now extract all the key data from both structured and unstructured documents with great accuracy and speed.

For over a decade, we have pretended to be paperless. We tout the fact that the file cabinets, the seven-part specialized file folders and massive mail rooms have all been eliminated and reduced, and we claim we are paperless. But we know we aren't. Today’s paper is PDFs, Excels and Adobe.

The filing cabinets have been replaced with digital folders and the mail rooms with emails and digital workflows. But insurance isn’t paperless; it just pretends to be. It doesn’t have to be that way. The technology to become truly digital exists. We just need to take the leap.

Michael Reilly, director in Accenture’s insurance practice

Acrisure reorganizes operations, changes branding strategy

Acquisitive insurance brokerage Acrisure LLC on Monday said it will implement a regional organizational structure for its operations and roll out a corporate branding strategy that will see the Acrisure name applied to its units.

Acrisure, which was founded in 2005 by CEO Gregory L. Williams, has grown rapidly over the past 10 years and is the world’s eighth-largest brokerage, according to Business Insurance’s most recent ranking.

The Grand Rapids, Michigan-based company has consistently been the most active acquirer of rival agents and brokers over the past several years but has often allowed purchased agencies to continue under their existing name.

“Today marks the next phase in Acrisure’s story,” Mr. Williams said in a statement. He added “the time is right to increasingly operate under the Acrisure flag.”

In addition, the brokerage will organize its operations by regions, which will be led by existing Acrisure leaders, the statement said.

Actual Cash Value on Roof Claims a Fairer, Simpler Way to Pay

In the May 15, 2023 Insurance Journal, independent adjuster Ben Mandell shared an opinion that Florida insurance policies have “one glaring endorsement that is missing” – roof endorsements that could have “eliminated or greatly minimized” Florida’s insurance crises. He argues that offering a stated value endorsement of $5,000 or $10,000 would limit the carrier’s maximum exposure and keep premiums more affordable.

He asks, “Why won’t the Florida insurance companies support a roof endorsement?”

For the past several years, the insurance industry has worked tirelessly with insurance agents, roofing contractors, the Florida Legislature and regulators to push for an endorsement that would pay a claim on the actual cash value (ACV) of a roof, like more than 40 states in the U.S. have.

Under ACV, an insurance company’s claim payout would be based on the pre-damaged roof’s current value, considering its age and condition. That’s exactly how automobile insurance claims are paid and how tire warranties work – by paying based on the remaining life of the tire. As one reader rightly commented, “If you have a 15-year-old roof damaged by hail, why should you get paid for the cost of a brand-new roof? You don’t get a brand-new car if your car is totaled in an accident.”