I’ll miss reading YOUR words weekly (or however often you published), but understand the reasons for passing the torch, and, as always, am very impressed with the diligence with which you effected the transfer. You put more effort into moving it forward post-Michael Gantt than most individuals put into their daily jobs.

Enjoy getting back to semi-retirement!

Mark

As a long time technology vendor (almost 35 years) to P+C insurance companies their unwillingness/inability to recognize that their businesses are very similar always amazed me. Were they to manage rating and underwriting deviations carefully, they could lower costs while increasing the effectiveness of their pricing and underwriting. As an added benefit they could (and should) automate with vendor supplied systems far more effectively and at a lower expense than doing it on their own.
Carriers need to make an effort to avoid being different without a clear business case that is reviewed periodically.

Their apparent desire is to be “different’ from their competitors in ways that have no benefit to their company other than “This is how we have always done it.”

No where is this more obvious than in rating. The machinations and deviations from their rating bureau (usually ISO) are amazing. Interestingly they are rarely understood and documented within the company. A high level of reverse engineering is usually required for the company to explain to a vendor how they actually rate.

Most companies also do not mange their underwriting effectively. I once had the opportunity to review auto insurance underwriting decisions for hundreds of thousands of policies from dozens of companies against external data. In almost all cases a third of the policies thought to be high risk were not and a third of the policies thought to be low risk were high risk. I know the results were valid because most companies adjusted their underwriting decisions based on the result of the review.

And generally the bigger the company, the worse the problem. Often regions have gone their own way and acquisitions and mergers add to the issue. Rarely does a company review and standardize as time passes.

Output documents such as declaration pages and bills have similar amounts of unique characteristics and resulting higher costs without any obvious benefit.