The best Nationwide agents are growing their agencies in commercial and financial services, recognizing that direct-channel preference means there are fewer personal-lines customers, Nationwide's CFO Mark Thresher tells PC360.

He says Nationwide has seen continued growth in its direct channel. Sometimes, the direct channel acts as a lead for agents, he notes. "We still have a fairly high percentage of customers who start on the Internet that actually either bind in our call center or bind with a local agent, so the agents are benefitting from it in that sense."

But he adds that the company's best agents are adapting to the marketplace. "I think they also realize that the future for agents is in financial services and commercial," Thresher says. "Customers are deciding to go direct for personal lines, and that's their choice. So our best agents are growing their agencies in commercial and financial services, and still serving the customers who want an agent in personal lines—there just are fewer of those today."

Weather losses hurt P&C Q1 results

For the 2014 first quarter, Nationwide saw net income fall to $140 million compared to $484 million in 2013's first quarter, with property and casualty results taking a hit from weather losses in January, Thresher says.

"Clearly for us this year, January was probably as high of weather losses as we've had historically."

P&C losses and loss expense climbed to $2.9 billion compared to $2.6 billion in 2013's first quarter. Consequently, P&C 2014 Q1 operating income fell to $140 million compared to $484 million the year before. "It's really weather year-over-year," Thresher says. "Last year was probably a more normal first quarter of weather-related losses, maybe even a pretty good one compared to some historical ones."

Thresher does not feel Nationwide is overexposed to weather losses in any one region. Rather, he says the prolonged freeze this winter simply impacted such a wide portion of the U.S. He notes that even Atlanta and areas south of there were affected. "If you look at the winter freeze, it was just so widespread and lasted so long. That was unusual," Thresher says. "We're really pretty comfortable with our geographic spread of business and we manage that carefully."

He adds, "Even if we look at April weather storms and tornadoes—we'll have our share of losses, but nothing overly significant there."

Nationwide also reports net realized investment losses, net of other-than-temporary impairment losses, of $326 million compared to a gain of $80 million in Q1 2013. Explaining this figure, Thresher says, "It's actually losses on some of our risk-management programs where we're hedging against movements in interest rates. And we're actually trying to protect statutory capital from a rise in interest rates in our variable-annuity business, and so when rates dropped this quarter we actually have a loss on the hedge. But we have offsetting movements on statutory liabilities that maintain capital that way."

He notes that the company saw the opposite impact in Q4, when rates went up "we saw gains in those programs that offset other movements in statutory. So it's not really losses on sales of securities or impaired securities, it's just part of our risk-management programs."

In general, Thresher says he's "very pleased with the results in the first quarter," stating that they represented a good recovery after a "tough January" with the weather losses. Overall, he says he sees "strong momentum across the board from a sales standpoint."

He says the strongest growth was seen in the company's financial-services business, which was up 12% year-over-year.

In P&C, he says the company grew most in standard commercial, in Scottsdale's excess and surplus lines business and in Nationwide Agribusiness.

Special Reports /

Nationwide's Thresher: Best Agents Growing in Commercial and Financial Services

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