News
Best’s Market Segment Report: US Personal Auto Insurance Segment Sustains Underwriting Turnaround Into 2025
U.S. personal auto insurers saw the segment’s first-half 2025 direct loss ratio fall again from the same two previous six-month periods, indicating that the significant rebound experienced in 2024 may carry over through 2025, according to a new AM Best report.
The Best’s Market Segment Report, "US Personal Auto’s 2024 Underwriting Performance Markedly Improves," states that the segment’s net underwriting income of nearly $14 billion in 2024 came on the heels of three straight years of underwriting losses, including a $17 billion loss in 2023. Additionally, the two segments of personal auto—auto liability and auto physical damage—turned a net profit in 2024. Unlike the last few years, in which auto liability proved to be the more profitable line, auto physical damage in 2024 achieved a significantly lower combined ratio (i.e., 87.9 compared with 101.2 in 2023) and higher net profits.
"Personal auto physical damage and auto liability combined for a decade-high overall net profit of $37.6 billion, which is the greatest profit for the segment in a decade and represents a huge recovery from 2022, where the two coverage parts combined for a reported net operating loss of more than $21 billion," said Helen Andersen, industry research analyst, AM Best.
The report states that the segment’s positive momentum has carried into 2025. The first-half 2025 direct loss ratio of 61.2 was a notable improvement over the 67.6 loss ratio recorded in first-half 2024 and superior to the 2023 first-half result of 77.1. With companies successfully achieving rate increases in recent years and being judicious in applying available pricing credits at the same time, earned premiums continue to strengthen as written premium totals rise.
Legal System Abuse/Social Inflation
Verdicts go nuclear: risk management in the age of social inflation | Insurance Business America
Litigation costs soar, public perceptions shift as firms face mounting threats
Social inflation, the phenomenon of rising civil litigation verdicts and costs that outpace general economic inflation, is exerting increasing pressure on businesses and insurers. This trend is particularly evident in the growth of so-called “nuclear verdicts” – jury awards of US$10 million or more.
According to Neil Beresford and Jestina Mascaro, both partners at Clyde & Co., these developments are reshaping risk and insurance strategies across multiple sectors.
“Often, these increases are best characterized by large jury awards of US$10 million or more, which have become known as ‘nuclear verdicts.’ These rising litigation costs and unpredictable verdicts can have an enormous impact on businesses and industries, including higher insurance premiums,” Beresford and Mascaro said.
Casualty Catastrophe Market Presents $5B Growth Opportunity as Mass Litigation Surges
Insurance industry leaders must position for structural shift as emerging risks reshape liability landscape: Aon and Moody's.
The casualty insurance market faces a $5 billion growth opportunity as mass litigation events become more frequent, transforming what were once rare occurrences into systematic market disruptions that rival property catastrophes in scale and impact, according to a new report from Moody’s and Aon.
Litigation financing and sophisticated plaintiff-generation practices are driving explosive growth in mass tort cases, according to the report. The transformation of casualty risk mirrors the evolution seen in the property catastrophe market decades earlier, but with distinctly modern characteristics.
Between 2014 and 2022, the U.S. market witnessed two to three new mass litigation episodes annually, encompassing risks from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) contamination and glyphosate-based herbicides to talc, opioids, and emerging concerns like hair relaxers and social media addiction, according to the report. Each mass litigation event carries the potential for billion-dollar losses, with historical precedents offering sobering context—asbestos litigation alone has generated nearly $100 billion in losses, the report noted.
These long-tail risks threaten the stability of insurers’ reserves and challenge traditional actuarial models that rely on historical benchmarks, the report said.
Financial Results
Fitch reports seventh year of double-digit growth for US E&S insurance in 2024
Fitch Ratings, a credit rating agency and provider of financial research, reported that the US excess and surplus (E&S) insurance market continued its remarkable growth streak in 2024, with direct written premiums rising 11 percent.
Although this was below the 15 percent expansion recorded in 2023, Fitch emphasised that the sector once again outpaced the broader US property and casualty (P&C) market, which grew by 8 percent.
Fitch noted that this marks the fourteenth consecutive year of expansion for E&S insurers and the seventh year in a row of gains above 10 percent.
According to Fitch, the E&S sector’s share of the total P&C market has nearly doubled since 2017, climbing from about 5 percent to 9 percent in both 2023 and 2024.
The agency expects that share could rise further, potentially reaching 12 percent in the next several years, but Fitch does not anticipate a lasting increase beyond that level unless major changes occur in property pricing or liability trends. Growth in 2024, Fitch explained, was broad across lines of business, with strong results in liability, property, commercial auto, and medical professional liability.
Fitch underscored that underwriting performance also remained superior to the overall P&C industry. E&S insurers recorded a direct combined ratio of 88 percent in 2024, compared with 95 percent for the broader market.
Although this was modestly weaker than the 86 percent ratio achieved in 2023, Fitch stressed that profitability remains far ahead of the five-year E&S average of 97 percent.
Research
U.S. Insurance Brokers Pursue Larger Acquisitions as Market Slows
North American insurance broker M&A deal sizes rose sharply over the past 24 months as organic growth slowed. This shift increases credit risks for rated issuers that continue to prioritize debt-financed M&A, says Fitch Ratings.
However, the sector’s recession-resistant nature and strong FCF partly offset these risks, allowing well-managed insurance brokers to withstand higher leverage than other corporate sectors.
Fitch expects positive but slower organic P&C growth to continue in the near term. Swiss RE projects U.S. P&C premium growth of 4%-5% in 2025-2026. Organic growth for leading brokers such as Brown & Brown (BBB/Stable) and Arthur J. Gallagher (BBB+/Stable) slowed to low- to mid-single digits in the first half of 2025, following strong pricing trends and high-single digits growth since 2020.
Strong P&C organic trends benefited materially from an overall inflationary environment post COVID and outpaced nominal GDP in 2023-2024. However, several growth drivers show signs of reversing, most notably property price appreciation. MORE
Announcements
Shift Technology Launches Shift Claims to Power Claims Transformation with Agentic AI
Shift Technology, the leading AI platform for insurance, today launched Shift Claims. Powered by agentic artificial intelligence (AI), Shift Claims helps transform claims operations by assessing and prioritizing cases, guiding and assisting claim handlers and automating tasks across the claims lifecycle.
The solution speeds processing, improves accuracy and lowers claims losses and handling costs - all while delivering better experiences for policyholders.
Claims transformation has long been constrained by the complexity of the process and the uniqueness of each claim. Because every claim follows a distinct journey from first notice of loss (FNOL) to closure, rules-based approaches struggle to handle the nuance and variability of most real-world cases. As a result, relying on business rules forces frequent human intervention even for routine tasks, slowing the process and increasing costs.
"It is not surprising that the results promised by claims transformation projects over the years have failed to materialize, because most technology based approaches were simply not up to the task of addressing claim complexity," explained Eric Sibony, chief scientist and chief product officer, Shift Technology. "Agentic AI provides insurers with a powerful transformation tool that increases automation when appropriate and also provides the right kind of advice, guidance, and recommendations when a human claim handler needs to be in the loop."
Click-Ins Awarded U.S. Patent for Breakthrough DamagePrint™ Technology in Image-Based Damage Identification
Click-Ins Awarded U.S. Patent for Breakthrough DamagePrint™ Technology in Image-Based Damage Identification
Click-Ins, a pioneer in AI-powered vehicle inspection solutions, announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has officially granted U.S.Patent No. 12374135B2 for its DamagePrint™ technology - a novel method of creating a unique digital signature of damage from a single image.
Unlike generic “damage detection” patents in the market, Click-Ins’ newly granted patent represents deep technology rooted in computer vision, visual intelligence, and criminology, built on nearly a decade of rigorous R&D. The DamagePrint™ system goes beyond detecting dents and scratches — it creates a digital fingerprint of each damage, enabling unmatched precision in matching and comparison across images.
“This patent is much more than legal protection — it validates the strength of our scientific and algorithmic foundation, which is not easily replicated or replaced by the latest wave of generative AI,” said Josh Parsons, CEO of Click-Ins. “Just as fingerprints uniquely identify humans in criminology, DamagePrint™ uniquely identifies damage. That uniqueness is what makes this technology transformative.”
Telematics, Driving & Insurance
PURE introduces teen driver program
The initiative, developed with Life360 , includes a complimentary two-year subscription to the family safety app, which offers features such as crash detection, speed monitoring, and emergency dispatch.
PURE Insurance also launched the Roadmap to Safer Driving, a conversation guide designed to help parents and teens establish driving expectations, available to both members and non-members.
In addition, PURE partnered with BMW to provide members discounted access to its Teen School, offering hands-on training in accident avoidance and emergency driving skills.
Teen drivers within PURE’s membership are twice as likely as adults to be involved in accidents, and their claims are three times more likely to involve severe damage or injury. The program reflects PURE’s broader effort to introduce solutions that respond to evolving member needs while promoting responsible driving practices.
AI in Insurance
At LIMRA 2025, experts urge insurers to accelerate AI transformation
The length of "addressable tasks" that artificial intelligence can complete has doubled every seven months for the past six years.
AI is changing the way we work, and insurance and financial services are among the industries leading the way. But it's not enough to simply incorporate AI, said Luke Purcell, managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group. Companies will have to evolve how work gets done in order to fully maximize the power of AI.
Purcell joined colleagues on an opening session Sunday at the LIMRA 2025 Annual Conference. Titled "The Intelligent Enterprise: Driving Value Through AI and Data," the session included dense slides packed with detailed information on how companies can scale up AI use in the coming years.
For all the experimentation in financial services, companies need to push further and fast, said David Cockerill, managing director and partner, Boston Consulting Group.
"Fifty percent of surveyed employees do not have a definitive view of how their organization wishes for them to approach AI," he said. "Thirty percent of them do not have any AI paper within the organization. So what they are losing is the opportunity to drive experimentation, to get AI fluency and start thinking about how that will impact or change their individual processes."
Insurance AI Pilots Without a Framework Are Risky Business
The insurance landscape is complex for many reasons.
Executive Summary
Failure is the point of pilots, explains Matthew Maginley, who helps organizations get the most out of pilots.
“A strong pilot should surface risk, expose misalignment, and include fluent operators shadowing outputs to catch errors early,” he writes. “That discipline prevents flawed workflows from scaling into costly mistakes.”
Here, he explains some of the basics of AI pilot planning for insurers and presents a list of potential pitfalls that doom pilot success from the get-go.
There are a multitude of products, riders and needs. Insurance is sold through four channels: company-tied agents (captive), multi-carrier brokers (independent), banks (bancassurance), and direct-to-consumer (direct). And that’s only the beginning.
Now add the fact that every state has its own insurance rules, that agents must prove their recommendations truly fit—and are in the customer’s best interest—and that reinsurance contracts can constrain what is sold and how it is priced, and it creates a dynamic, challenging environment begging for emerging tech tools to lighten the load.
So, why are AI pilots failing? FULL COMMENTARY
Matthew Maginley helps organizations align AI with measurable ROI
How Generative AI is Transforming P&C Claims: Insights from Turvi’s Ken Tolson
Generative AI emerged as a major shift for insurers to extract greater value from existing investments and simultaneously modernize operations. Big-bang adoption is discouraged by experts; instead, they suggest setting a small application, proving incremental business value, and then scaling based on a strategic roadmap.
In this episode of the Analytics Insight Podcast, Priya Dialani speaks to Ken Tolson, Chief Executive Officer of Turvi, to discuss generative AI methods that are targeting pain points in property and casualty insurance claims.
Turvi started its journey in October 2024, as part of the rebranded version of Crawford & Company's small digital solutions practice. The company will be looking at SaaS offerings in the property and casualty ecosystem, with claims getting a very heavy emphasis. According to Tolson, generative AI had always been part of their strategy since it became mainstream around the period of 2024-25.
Why Claims Need AI Intervention Property and Causal Claims relating to automobile accidents and natural disasters generate numerous forms of unstructured data encompassing adjusters' notes, policy clauses, repair estimates, and IoT readings. Traditionally, processing this data took hours, which eventually delayed the outcomes, and users wanted it done quickly yet with clarity.
“The ability to interpret policy in near real-time is a game-changer,” Tolson explains. This means not only is it much more efficient, but it also opens up the possibility of extending coverage tools directly to consumers and increasing transparency and trust.
Awards
Global Innovation Awards Finalists Announced | Global Insurance Forum on Oct. 26-27 in Rüschlikon, Switzerland. |International Insurance Society
The Global Innovation Awards, presented by the International Insurance Society and Insurance Thought Leadership, celebrate the transformative power of innovation within the insurance and risk management industry. These prestigious awards recognize insurers and insurtechs that push boundaries, drive positive change, and contribute to a more sustainable society.
Three winners representing three categories — Property & Casualty, Life | Health | Retirement, and Predict & Prevent — will be honored at the Global Insurance Forum on Oct. 26-27 in Rüschlikon, Switzerland.
Life/Health/Retirement Innovator of the Year – 2025 Finalists
Irish Life: CARA - Claims AI Reasoning Assistant A multimodal AI solution that automates document processing, accelerates claims assessments, and enhances accuracy, efficiency, and customer satisfaction during life’s most critical moments.
RGA: MedScreen+: A Pioneering AI-Driven Solution Strengthens Digital Underwriting An AI and OCR powered underwriting solution that digitizes and standardizes health records, enabling faster, more accurate, and customer-friendly life insurance decisions while bridging the gap between centuries-old practices and the modern era.
Property/Casualty Innovator of the Year – 2025 Finalists
Gallagher: Global Data & Technology Capabilities A long-term, innovative data and analytics platform that simplifies complex industry insights into rates, losses, and limits, empowering clients, brokers, and partners with timely, holistic intelligence to make confident, informed decisions.
Tawuniya: End-to-End Motor Claims Transformation A fully digital motor claims platform that streamlines the entire journey from accident reporting to settlement, delivering faster processing, greater transparency, and higher customer satisfaction for over 1 million users annually.
Insurtech Predict & Prevent Innovator of the Year – 2025 Finalists
AXA: Digital Commercial Platform: Transforming Insurance at a Time of Polycrisis A one-stop, AI-powered ecosystem that unites real-time catastrophe intelligence, cyber defense, risk tools, and training to help organizations predict, prevent, and respond to today’s interconnected crises.
Tawuniya: Vitality & Drive: A Lifestyle-Based Ecosystem Leveraging gamified insurance, health apps, and telematics to engage 500K+ users in safer driving and healthier living, cutting accidents by over 25% and reducing claims while building resilience.
JUDGES
- Stephen Applebaum, Managing Partner, Insurance Solutions Group
- Matteo Carbone, Founder and Director. IoT Observatory
- George Kesselman, Founder and President, InsurTech Asia Association
- David Piesse, Insurance Lead and Advisor Board, Vulcain Ai
- Joe Powell, Chief Digital Office, Gallagher Bassett
- Callie Thomas, Head of Strategy and Planning, Zinnia
For more information about the Global Innovation Awards, visit
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