Why Not Go Direct on Homeowners, Allstate CEO Asks  February 16th 2023

Why Not Go Direct on Homeowners, Allstate CEO Asks

When Allstate’s chief executive officer looks at potential growth opportunities for personal lines insurers, he sees an untapped part of the homeowners insurance market—customers that will buy home insurance online.

Speaking at the Bank of America U.S. Insurance Conference yesterday, Allstate Chair and CEO Thomas Wilson, who spends a lot of time talking about repricing and underwriting actions in auto insurance at investor conferences these days, devoted some of his remarks to homeowners instead.

“In the direct space, very few people sell homeowners,” Wilson said, referring to carriers using direct distribution channels to acquire customers rather than through agency channels. “It doesn’t make any sense to me. People buy houses on the Internet, right? They buy cars on the Internet. There’s really no reason why they shouldn’t buy homeowners on the Internet. Yet, right now very few people buy homeowners insurance on the Internet.”

Global insurers shift from delivering risk coverage to reducing and preventing risk

Today's consumers want more from their insurance companies. Following several years of turbulence, including extreme weather, the COVID-19 pandemic and disease, significant disruption is radically changing the risk landscape for consumers with more and different risks. With this reality, consumers want their insurance companies to more than just help them when there is disruption, but help them reduce and prevent risk too. Bain & Company's new report, launched today, Customer Behavior and Loyalty in Insurance: Global Edition 2023, gives insight into the changing approaches of insurers and needs of consumers.

Verisk (AIR) pegs Turkey quake economic loss at $20bn+, insured at $1bn+

Verisk Extreme Event Solutions, formerly AIR Worldwide, has estimated that economic losses from the devastating earthquakes that struck Turkey will reach above US $20 billion, while the insurance and reinsurance industry faces a bill of above US $1 billion.

Verisk's Respond MAP Weather Analytics Wins 2023 BIG Innovation Award

Verisk’s Respond MAP, an interactive weather and analytics platform, has been named a winner in the 2023 BIG Innovation Awards presented by the Business Intelligence Group. The award recognizes organizations, products and people that are bringing new ideas to life in innovative ways.

Respond MAP, which helps users analyze the impact of severe weather, was selected after its impactful contribution to the insurance industry during Hurricane Ian preparation and recovery efforts. When Hurricane Ian approached the Florida coastline, Verisk offered insurers the ability to track the storm and monitor potential impacts to their books of business with Respond Hurricane forecast footprints with the mapping and analytics platform. After landfall, this powerful blend of technology helped insurers to quickly identify damage, connect with policyholders impacted by the storm – many of whom had evacuated – and triage claims in the wake of this devastating event.

IIHS Research Says 7 of 10 Consumers Report Issues with Common Accident-Avoidance Features After Collision Repair

Crash avoidance features have proven safety benefits, but majority of vehicle owners report problems with the technology following repairs. Consumers who had repairs performed at OEM dealers report fewer post-repair problems.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety surveyed owners of vehicles equipped with front crash prevention, blind spot detection or rearview or other visibility-enhancing cameras. Among those who reported that at least one of those systems had been repaired for any reason, about half said they had issues with the features after the job was completed. For respondents that reported they had a repair performed to the systems following repairs due to crash damage, the percentage reporting issues after repair jumped to 70-74% depending upon the system involved.

Viewpoint: Used-Vehicle Prices May Be Cresting but Insurers Still Underwater

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” would be an apt description of the last few years for auto insurers. Immediately after a nationwide, months-long driving hiatus caused collisions to plummet and profits to surge, a toxic cocktail of supply chain disruptions, increases in the frequency and severity of collisions and a complete dislocation in used-vehicle prices drove loss ratios into the red for many auto insurance companies. Through the end of 2022, auto insurer losses and expenses continued to outpace premium growth for major industry players. While some of those trends have now started to change course, the myriad challenges facing the industry are far from solved.

Chief among these is the issue of frothy used-vehicle pricing. Prices for used cars surged roughly 50% through February of 2022 while auto insurance contract pricing systems predicted car values would continue to go down with a constant depreciation – a generally accepted trend for the last several decades of experience in retail used car valuation.

Used-vehicle prices continued to stay elevated throughout 2022 and, just in the past two months, they have begun to recede. However, as the auto industry continues to be transformed by the introduction of EVs and volatile swings in supply and demand become the norm, these once-in-a-lifetime anomalies are likely to happen a lot more frequently.

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

Revealing the holes in roof age data and how to repair them

For P&C insurers, knowledge is power. The more you know about a property’s current and historical condition, the better equipped you are to make decisions at every stage of the policy lifecycle. One current significant gap in this knowledge is roof age.

Roof age is difficult to determine with precise accuracy. This is a problem for insurers, as it is a critical factor to consider when evaluating and pricing property risk. A report by Verisk found that inaccurate roof age data costs insurers up to $1.31 billion in premiums annually. In truth, unless you have direct knowledge of the date a roof was replaced, any estimation you make will be imprecise. Insurers have historically made this estimation by directly asking policyholders or by consulting permit data, but these methods return unreliable data.

AI and ML Use in Insurtech With Tarci, Devron, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Foresight, and Acrisure

Two of the biggest game changers in the insurtech industry have been the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Together, these two technologies have uprooted the traditions of the insurance sector and reworked it completely. Understanding how they have done so, we reached out to the industry:

A move to continuous underwriting

For Leetal Gruper, co-founder and CEO at Tarci, a continuous intelligence engine that generates dynamic SMB data, there have been two big ways in which AI and ML have changed the industry.

“Firstly the impact of continuous underwriting. With the advance of data driven by AI, forward-thinking carriers are moving from one-off underwriting (once a year at the point of binding a policy) to continuous underwriting that changes and adjusts as client needs change