At a time when new capacity is coming into the inland marine market, professionals in the sector are wondering if there are enough talented underwriters to go around.

Some complain that the insurance industry in general has not invested much time or money into training new talent for around 10 years, and the problems that are arising because of this are being felt particularly hard in specialty lines like inland marine.

With the lack of trained professionals, new entrants in the market have been either using in-house underwriters with little or no experience in inland marine, or hiring away talent from other companies--who might then be poached by another insurer in a professional shuffle that Ron Thornton, president of the Inland Marine Underwriters Association, called "musical chairs."

Explaining that the war for talent extends industrywide, Sophia Phillips, vice president of the marine division at Hanover Insurance Group, said that "what's happened is companies, especially in the last soft market, started cutting out a lot of training...So the industry hasn't trained in a long time, and when you start cutting out training, what suffers the most is the specialty lines."

During the late 1980s and into the 1990s, companies were consolidating rapidly, noted Ms. Phillips, and in an attempt to get more value for their labor dollars, they shifted inland marine underwriting responsibilities to their multiline underwriters.

As this trend increased, it caused some fear among inland marine underwriters, who were concerned their jobs might become obsolete. Some left to work in other lines, and no new talent was trained, according to Ms. Phillips.

Compounding the problem, she said, is that with all of the mergers and acquisitions in the last 10 years, approximately a dozen markets that had credible marine departments were acquired. "So all of a sudden, you don't have so many major competitors," Ms. Phillips noted. "You have a few that have a lot and a bunch that just dabble."

Now, she said, in this soft market, there are companies that want to grow in inland marine, but not a lot of trained professionals to help them do it. "So there's also a lot of na?ve capacity out there--maybe folks who really haven't been through a soft market like this before, who may not understand the dynamics of a soft market."

And it is not necessarily the new entrants that make up such "na?ve capacity." Rich Soja, global manager of Chubb Marine Underwriters, said that with the new capacity hiring away seasoned underwriters, the existing companies from which they came are forced to backfill.

"So if you look at it more in terms of new underwriters--human beings--as opposed to new underwriting companies," Mr. Soja said, "we have a lot more underwriters in the mix now without really bringing new talent into the industry en masse in the past 10 years, and you start to question: Are the training programs in place to make sure they know what they're doing? Are they adequately equipped to be able to make smart decisions?"

While companies by necessity are beginning to train again, Mr. Thornton sees an opportunity for IMUA to assist in this area. One of his goals, he said, is to help prepare generation X and Y workers for the inland marine sector.

"They're looking for information, and they're looking for training," Mr. Thornton said. "Our goal, and what we've been working on as an association since I've been here, is we want to be the education provider--the information provider to employees of member companies. And I think that's the key thing that we can provide."

Help Wanted Art--read like a newspaper ad:

Special Reports /

Inland Marine Insurers Battle For Talent As Capacity Expands

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