2023 North Atlantic hurricane season officially underway  June 1st 2023

2023 North Atlantic hurricane season officially underway

The 2023 North Atlantic hurricane season officially gets underway on Thursday, June 1, and runs for six months through to Thursday, November 30.

Ahead of the start of the season, several forecasting agencies and groups have issued seasonal outlooks that provide a guide to the expected level of activity this year. The forecasts are typically revised in early August ahead of the historically most active months of the season, August, September, and October.

Most forecasting groups and agencies predict near-normal activity in the basin this season, which comprises the North Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico.

• The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has forecasted 12–17 named storms, of which 5–9 are expected to become hurricanes, and 1–4 of those are forecasted to become major hurricanes (Category 3 or stronger).
• NOAA has a 70 percent confidence in these ranges.
• On average, the North Atlantic sees 14 named storms, 7 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes.
• Outlooks from other meteorological forecast agencies and groups are broadly in line with the guidance issued by NOAA in calling for a near-normal season, however, most forecasts exhibit increased uncertainty compared to normal due to the factors influencing this year’s forecast.

These forecasts reflect the state of the main oceanic and climate factors that historically influence hurricane activity in the basin: the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic.

VIU by HUB Mobile App

VIU by HUB (VIU), a digital insurance brokerage platform, announced today the launch of its new mobile app and enhanced digital wallet that makes managing personal insurance policies simpler and more seamless than ever before.

The wallet is capable of storing policies across insurance types and carriers, regardless of source. These new digital capabilities mark the latest innovations VIU is implementing to improve the personal insurance journey for all consumers.

With VIU’s mobile app and enhanced digital wallet, consumers can compare, shop for, and navigate personal insurance policies across auto, home, condo, renters, life, and pet. Consumers, regardless of whether they are a VIU customer, can also import existing policies from various carriers across 20 types of insurance, providing a clear view of all their policy coverage details in one place.

“At VIU by HUB, we’re merging technology with our decades of expertise as a leading insurance broker to develop solutions that change the way consumers navigate personal insurance,” said Bryan Davis, EVP and Head of VIU. “Our enhanced digital wallet and new mobile app allow consumers to view their coverage holistically, regardless of whether they obtained it through us, and receive impartial advice on how best to move forward when it comes time to renew.”

P&C insurers upping their digital presence to attract rising surge of shoppers: J.D. Power

Historic rate increases within the P&C insurance industry have “pushed” a record-high volume of shoppers into the online marketplace to seek new quotes and switch carriers.

Research from J.D. Power’s 2023 US Insurance Digital Experience Study shows that insurers have been addressing the needs of those shoppers via the digital channel.

According to the firm, overall customer satisfaction with the P&C insurer digital shopping experience sits at 521 – on a 1,000-point scale – which has increased by 22 points from last year’s study. However, J.D. Power notes that relative to customer satisfaction scores with digital shopping tools in other industries, such as banking and airlines, the insurance industry still has a “long way to go.”

At the same time, overall customer satisfaction with the digital service experience sits at 702, down 3 points from 2022.

Customers’ inability to find the information they need is highlighted as being the biggest single drag on service experience satisfaction.

Overall customer satisfaction with digital account servicing and shopping is slightly higher among traditional insurers when compared to digital native InsurTech brands, J.D. Power notes.

That car is worth WHAT?

If you were to rent a car, you would expect that a more expensive vehicle would cost more to rent. You would also expect that if you damaged that more expensive vehicle, it may cost more to repair. So, you would not be surprised to see a higher cost insurance option associated with the more expensive (and perhaps more powerful and/or luxurious) versions offered in a series of vehicle options.

While that line of thinking is intuitive, your regular insurance program for your vehicle is not working quite like that – at least not yet.

While the base price of any vehicle can move your insurance rate north, as you add on optional equipment to that vehicle, most current insurance pricing systems don’t take those new features into account. Existing pricing models ignore anything beyond the base price new from an MSRP on the window sticker. What might be more surprising, that is the last time they think about the value of your car– traditionally, it’s all downhill from there.

Marty Ellingsworth, Executive Managing Director, P&C Insurance Intelligence Group. J.D. Power

What is parametric insurance and why should we care?

A fact that has been hard to swallow and often debated is that insurance is not available to cover every loss.

There are various reasons for this — perhaps the loss cannot be modeled with any degree of predictability to enable insurers to set an appropriate rate for coverage, or the loss is not accidental in nature and could have been prevented, or the loss would be so widespread and catastrophic that insurers could never take in enough premiums to cover all the policyholder losses, which of course can also be said of pandemics.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit businesses and the economy hard, and policyholders were looking to their insurers to recoup some of their financial loss, regardless of whether coverage actually existed on the policy for those losses. Because pandemic coverage is nonexistent on standard insurance policies, the question arose as to who should (and how to) cover the various costs arising from COVID-19 and any similar pandemic in the future. However, this is just one issue — with growing climate change issues, there are stronger and more damaging storms, greater risks of flooding, increasing droughts and wildfires, and a host of other hazards that are difficult if not impossible to insure.

FC&S Editors

Harnessing the power of big data: A new era for insurance and InsurTech

The term “big data” refers to the vast volumes of structured and unstructured data collected from various sources that, when analyzed, can provide valuable insights to drive business decisions and improve operational efficiency. But what does it really mean for the industry, and how is it transforming the traditional landscape of insurance?

For insurance providers, big data is akin to a gold mine. It comes from numerous sources such as customer demographics, social media engagement, online behaviour, claims histories, and risk data. It even includes real-time data from connected devices like smart home systems and car telematics.

The industry’s ability to collate, process, and analyse this data on a large scale is fundamentally altering how insurers assess risk, price policies, and interact with their customers.

Mike Winterle, product marketing manager, at cloud-native insurance platform Novidea, said that big data is increasingly transforming the insurance industry by “enabling more accurate risk assessment, improving underwriting and pricing, streamlining the claims handling process, and enhancing the customer experience.”

How to Capitalize Data in the Insurance Industry?

We have been talking, in a generalized way and in all industries, about the importance of data and the consequent potential application of Artificial Intelligence. The Insurance sector is not an exception.

Undoubtedly, there are several points of view when concerning this matter. From those who bet over a great disruption of these technologies and promote them actively, to those who, from other perspectives, think that these innovations conflict with the rol of human beings in today’s society: new ways of working, mechanization or industrialization of different processes, etc.

In the Insurance sector, we are not exaggerating when affirming that technologies as Data Intelligence or AI itself have become indispensable. They present themselves as one of the major leverages for the creation of new business models, products and services that insurers offer to their clients.

The new Insurance liquid ecosystem paradigm has come to stay. In this scenario, consumers interact with companies, but in a fluid and liquid manner. For instance, there are already Airlines that offer health-related services in partnership with an Insurance company or a healthcare group. And they do so with great agility to give answer to the needs of their clients in the face of challenges as important as the one presented by COVID-19.