News
Reno wildfire grows to 15,000 acres as Nevada's new wildfire exclusion law faces its first real test
A wildfire burning on the outskirts of Reno remained uncontained as of Monday, with the Reno Fire Department warning the blaze could stay active for another 48 hours given continued dry, windy conditions.
First reported Saturday at 11:15am local time, the fire has burned roughly 15,000 acres, and approximately 90,000 people remain under evacuation notices with no timeline yet for their return. Governor Joe Lombardo declared a state of emergency for affected areas of Washoe County and the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony.
BBC Weather's Matt Taylor noted Nevada carries elevated wildfire risk due to its dry climate combined with an abundance of invasive grasses that fuel rapid fire spread, and said shifting wind direction, southwest by day pushing the fire toward the city, southeast by night favoring firefighters, will likely shape how the blaze behaves over the coming days.
Commercial Property Rate Cuts Deepen As Soft Market Spreads Across Nearly All Account Sizes
Premiums fell for every account size in the second quarter of 2026, the first time that has happened in 34 quarters, according to The Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers.
Commercial property/casualty premiums declined by an average of 2.0% across all account sizes in the second quarter of 2026, up from a 1.2% average decrease in the first quarter, according to The Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers’ latest Commercial Property/Casualty Market Report.
The Council reported that large accounts (generating more than $100,000 in commission and fee revenue) saw the steepest drop, with premiums falling an average of 3.7%, followed by medium accounts (between $25,000 and $1000,000) at 1.9% and small accounts (less than $25,000) at 0.5%, according to the survey of member brokerages.
According to the report, this marked the first time in 34 quarters that every account size category posted a decrease simultaneously. Ten lines of business recorded average premium decreases in the quarter, one more than in the first quarter of 2026, and the average change across all lines of business, including the major lines, was a 0.3% decrease.
Wholesale Used-Vehicle Values Go Flat Year Over Year in Mid-August, Manheim Index Shows -
Mid-August reading shows the wholesale index nearly matching year-ago levels after months of stronger gains.
Wholesale used-vehicle prices are now roughly even with year-ago levels, a shift from the stronger annual gains recorded earlier in the year, according to the Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index published Aug. 19 by Cox Automotive.
The index fell 1.2% in the first half of August compared with July, dropping to 207.4 on a mix-, mileage- and seasonally adjusted basis. Non-adjusted wholesale prices decreased 0.8% over the same period and are down 0.2% year over year.
The figure feeds directly into insurers' actual cash value math, which shops rely on to know whether a vehicle stays in the repair queue or gets written off.
BASE EFFECT DRIVES FLAT COMPARISON
Jonathan Gregory, senior director at Cox Automotive, attributed the flat annual reading largely to a difficult comparison point rather than a market downturn. "Wholesale values eased in the first half of August, with the Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index at 207.4, down 1.2% from July," Gregory said in the report. "That's a bit more depreciation than the recent-year average for this month, but well within the normal historical range for August."
Climate/Resilience/Sustainability
Catastrophe Models Lack Key Data | Insurance Thought Leadership
Catastrophe modeling has spent the last 20 years getting more precise about where a catastrophe happened and what was affected.
Parcel-level geocoding, building-level vulnerability, more accurate secondary modifiers and high-resolution terrain data are examples of this focus. Yet almost no progress has been about when events occurred during the catastrophe. Data resolution is no longer the binding constraint on understanding risk, cadence is.
In my years working with insurance buyers of remote sensing data, one refrain came up constantly, "this is great," they would say about high-resolution aerial or satellite imagery, "but I also need to know what is happening before, during, and after an event to fully understand my risk."
There is no clearer example of that temporal gap than wildfire. Wildfire conditions can be forecast, but unlike an impending hurricane there are no days of notice for when they start, just the standing risk that one could begin at any moment. And unlike most other perils, wildfires can be slowed or contained. We can do more than build better and warn people – with the right data at the right time, we can change the outcome of an event.
lizabeth Foughty is chief business officer and co-founder of Orbital Sentry
Climate volatility is rewriting the insurance claims operating model
In insurance, the extraordinary nature of major catastrophes quickly becomes part of the operating environment.
Climate volatility has fundamentally changed the way in which property and casualty insurers function. Major events that used to represent isolated shocks such as wildfires, floods and convective storms have quickly become recurring operational realities that test claims organizations with increasing frequency and intensity.
For insurers, this is a major test of their operating models. Competitive advantage will increasingly depend on the ability to accurately price catastrophe risk alongside effectively responding when thousands of policyholders need help simultaneously.
This changes the conversation, and the industry needs to be building and preparing to perform reliably in a world where disruption has become routine.
Telematics, Driving & Insurance
Road Risk Alert: Distraction rises 8.5% and speeding jumps 34% on Labor Day - Cambridge Mobile Telematics
Labor Day gives millions of Americans one last chance to get away before summer winds down. Last year, an estimated 95 million Americans planned a day trip to the beach or traveled to a Labor Day party.
As Americans make the most of the long weekend, driving on Labor Day comes with added risk. According to NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) from 2020 to 2024, Labor Day averaged 116 fatal crashes — 12% more than the recorded crashes on a typical Monday surrounding the long weekend. Fatal crashes involving speeding are also 36% higher on Labor Day.
CMT’s latest analysis looks at how driving behavior shifts on Labor Day. Drawing on more than 32 million trips from 2023 to 2025, we compared distraction, speeding, and high-speed distraction on the holiday with the same hours on surrounding Mondays. All three behaviors increase, with some of the biggest spikes occurring during the morning and afternoon travel windows.
CMT defines distraction as tapping on a phone while driving above 9 mph and speeding as driving at least 9.3 mph over the posted speed limit for at least 300 feet. High-speed distraction measures phone movement with the screen on while driving above 50 mph.
AI in Insurance
NAIC summer 2026: Colorado commissioner urges action toward an AI model law
Pursuing an AI model law within the National Association of Insurance Commissioners is an important step to ensure the power of the state-based regulatory system is preserved, according to Colorado Insurance Commissioner Michael Conway.
"I fundamentally think that when other regulatory bodies, whether at the state or federal level, try to regulate the business of insurance, they don't do a good job," Conway said in an interview with S&P Global Market Intelligence on the sidelines of the NAIC's recent summer meeting in Columbus, Ohio. "That's why I think it's so important for us to make sure that we are continuing to move that conversation forward."
An NAIC model law is a regulation adopted by the organization intended to provide uniformity to how an issue is approached across the country. States' adoption of insurance model laws and regulations is largely what creates a harmonized legal framework for insurance regulation in the US.
Travelers builds its own LLM, cutting AI costs | CIO Dive
AI cost management has become a primary concern for executives. Some companies, such as Travelers Insurance, are adding flexibility to their model selection — while also building their own to mitigate costs.
In June, the insurer, which generated $49 billion in revenues in 2025 and employs 30,000, unveiled a proprietary large language model called TravelersLLM. The internal model delivers better results than commercially available AI models when it comes to insurance-related questions and is cheaper to run than frontier models, according to Mojgan Lefebvre, EVP, chief technology and operations officer at Travelers.
Although the company worked to build and incorporate a lower-cost internal model into its ecosystem, Lefebvre said the model works alongside frontier models and is not a replacement for the innovation and advancements offered by frontier developers. When Travelers’ applications handle a query, it’s either directed to TravelersLLM or a frontier model depending on the task, Lefebvre said.
Claims
Nearmap Launches itel Total Price, Bringing Guaranteed Whole-Home Pricing to Property Claims
Nearmap, the leading property intelligence provider, today announced itel Total Price, a new whole-home pricing solution that delivers guaranteed pricing for major exterior and interior building materials across the entire claim.
Property insurers continue to face growing pressure to settle claims faster while managing rising material costs, inconsistent estimates, and increased scrutiny around claims settlements. Disconnected pricing workflows and limited visibility into real-world sourcing conditions often lead to supplements, contractor disputes, and delays that impact both claim outcomes and policyholder satisfaction.
Powered by proprietary Nearmap property intelligence, itel Total Price gives insurers a defensible way to manage material pricing across the claim lifecycle. By embedding guaranteed pricing directly into the claims process, the solution helps reduce friction for adjusters, minimize supplements and disputes, and improve consistency from estimate through settlement.
"Insurers have told us they want material pricing backed by fulfillment without adding complexity to the adjuster workflow," said Paul Disney SVP of Product at Nearmap. "itel Total Price gives carriers a single trusted source for guaranteed pricing across the entire home, helping improve claim outcomes within the trusted Verisk Xactimate(R) platform."
Legal System Abuse/Social Inflation
Demotech, Inc.: Tech-enabled Litigation Instigation Necessitates Granularity of Loss Costs
Tech-enabled litigation instigation, the once covert online business model unearthed by Demotech's research project coupled with mutations in the legal profession necessitate a more granular presentation of loss costs.
Joseph L. Petrelli, ACAS, ASA, MAAA, MBA, president and co-founder, Demotech, Inc. notes "In 2022, our postmortem of failed carriers identified new, annual litigation as the proximate cause of what destroyed them. Our subsequent research project, undertaken by Todd Kozikowski, determined that the industrial scale increases in litigated claims were accomplished through technology, online marketing, and advertising, sometimes financed through third-party litigation funding. Subsequent research by Demotech identified changes within the legal profession. The changes in the legal profession include alternative business structures, managed services organizations, and other mutations that may circumvent the disclosure of third-party litigation funding. In this environment, regulators, legislators, and stakeholders need additional granularity in the presentation of loss costs. We need to focus on the components, not the composite."
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