The “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. before a crowd of some 250,000 people at the 1963 March on Washington, remains one of the most famous speeches in history.  January 16th 2023

MLK's I Have A Dream Speech Video & Text

The “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. before a crowd of some 250,000 people at the 1963 March on Washington, remains one of the most famous speeches in history.

Weaving in references to the country’s Founding Fathers and the Bible, King used universal themes to depict the struggles of African Americans before closing with an improvised riff on his dreams of equality. The eloquent speech was immediately recognized as a highlight of the successful protest, and has endured as one of the signature moments of the civil rights movement.

Repeating the mantra, “I have a dream” he offered up hope that....

“my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” and the desire to “transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”

“And when this happens,” he bellowed in his closing remarks, “and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'”

Atmospheric Rivers and Bomb Cyclones Saturate California in the New Year

CoreLogic® is monitoring the ongoing flash and riverine flooding in California

The New Year brought unseasonably wet conditions to California. A series of atmospheric rivers and frontal systems, including a bomb cyclone, slammed into California starting Friday, Dec. 31, 2022 and continued through the week of Jan. 9, 2023. The storm systems included multiple atmospheric rivers that provided excessive moisture, resulting in heavy rainfall that saturated much of California and caused localized riverine and flash flooding and mudslides.

98% of California homeowners don't have flood insurance

Only 2% of homeowners in California have flood insurance. And the wave of storms hitting the state are far from over. Standard homeowners insurance does not cover flood damage.

Trevor Burgess, CEO of Neptune Flood

Interview: Bill Brower, VP of Industry Relations at Solera - CollisionWeek

The impact of inflation on critical cost drivers for the auto claims and collision repair industries has increased claims severity across the globe. As CollisionWeek has reported, key drivers of repair costs, such as used car prices, energy, parts and health care appear in monthly price data from the government have risen dramatically. With collision repair demand and employment at record levels, competition is also driving up labor costs.

To better understand how inflation is impacting the industry, CollisionWeek spoke with Bill Brower, vice president of industry relations for Solera.

In our video interview embedded below, Brower details how inflation is surfacing in its estimate data in North America and globally, as well as how the industry is adapting to improve its operations and efficiency.

LexisNexis Telematics OnDemand Wins 2023 IoT Breakthrough Award for Connected Car Insurance Innovation

IoT Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global Internet-of-Things (IoT) market, today announced that it has selected LexisNexis® Risk Solutions, a leading provider of data and analytics for the insurance and automotive industries, as winner of "Connected Car - Insurance Solution of the Year" award in the 7th annual IoT Breakthrough Awards program, honoring the breakthrough innovation of the LexisNexis® Telematics OnDemand solution.

Situational Awareness Will Be Key for Insurance IT Success in 2023

Insurance executives leading as if it were 2019 would do well to heed Churchill’s dictum that, ‘Generals are always ready to fight the last war.’

Now that we’ve closed the books on 2022, it’s perhaps appropriate to consider how different the year we are headed into will be from those we fondly remember from the past. For insurance carrier IT organizations, planning now for this future will be key. As Winston Churchill noted in 1940, “generals are always ready to fight the last war.” The corporate equivalent of this would be to think that 2019 will represent what a post-pandemic era will look like.

Reinsurers Retreat From U.S. Disaster Hotspots on Climate Risks

Climate change, which has increased the frequency and severity of weather-related natural catastrophes, poses a significant challenge to reinsurers, who absorb risk from insurance firms. Over the past five years, insured natural catastrophe losses averaged about $100 billion, with 71 percent of the losses occurring in North America, the report said.

Insured losses are separate from total economic losses because not all property is insured.

Bold Movers and Losers: Incumbents Need to Act While InsurTechs Stumble

At a time when InsurTechs face major headwinds and incumbent insurers benefit from market tailwinds, it’s time for the traditional insurers to make bold strategic moves, McKinsey partners said in a December 2022 article.

Today’s market dynamics “have effectively turned the tables,” wrote Doug McElhaney and Jason Ralph in their article, “Opportunities for insurers in a rapidly shifting insurtech market.”

After reviewing the plummeting valuation figures for a cohort of InsurTechs—with September 2022 values of P/C InsurTechs Root, Hippo and Lemonade, for example, all down around 90 percent from all-time highs, and Duck Creek down 80 percent—the authors note the promising conditions facing incumbents. In particular, rising interest rates and hard markets are buoying traditional carriers, they wrote noting that in the prior decade incumbents struggled to earn their cost of capital.

Video telematics: A win-win for insurers, fleet owners

When an accident happens on the road, there are many potential causes: poor driver behavior, a missing sign, road conditions, or countless other instigators. Historically, determining the cause required the less-than-perfect recollection of the participants and/or any available witnesses, leading to potentially incorrect findings.

Technological advancements and the near-ubiquity of mobile phones solved this problem by introducing video telematics to commercial drivers and their employers. Amongst large fleet commercial operators, it is considered the norm to implement a video-based telematics solution for monitoring and protecting large fleets and their drivers. But now, this tool is increasingly becoming popular for smaller fleets with under 20 vehicles fleet operators — the majority of the market. It follows that the power of video telematics are now a larger topic of discussion in the property and casualty insurance market.

Fleet owners and their insurance providers should align on removing ambiguity from accidents so the insurance companies can process claims faster. There’s nothing less ambiguous than a dual-facing video that can easily record the action on the road and what the driver is doing in order to protect their side of the story.

Digital Insurance The DIG

Let's have some fun looking at some of the tech exhibited at this year's Consumer Electronics Show for potential insurance applications, shall we?