Bragg Promises TRI Program Open Door

Bragg Promises TRI Program Open Door

By Mark E. Ruquet

Jeffrey S. Bragg, the industry- and government-savvy executive tapped to run the federal Terrorism Risk Insurance Program, said he plans to make that operation as responsive to insurer concerns as possible.

“We are going to be a very open program and we will continually look to get input and reply to [the insurance industrys] concerns as best as we possibly can,” Mr. Bragg told National Underwriter.

He added that his office would have as much of an “open door” policy to agents, insurers and regulators as a Federal program will allow.

Mr. Bragg is no stranger to the operations of government in Washington–during the Reagan Administration he was a Federal Insurance administrator.

Beginning April 7, he will be responsible for managing and implementing the TRIA program, setting operational guidelines and policies and overseeing all its personnel. Mr. Bragg will serve under Wayne A. Abernathy, the Treasury assistant secretary for financial institutions, the department said.

TRIA was set up by Congress last year as a reinsurance backstop program that would cover losses from a foreign terrorist act above 7 percent of the direct-earned premium of insurers in the first year of the program.

Mr. Bragg said he did not want to discuss specific details of the program until taking office. He said he looks forward to the opportunity to develop something new. Mr. Bragg said his first step will be to prioritize what needs to be done and go from there.

Mr. Bragg, from 1981 to 1986, was administrator of the Federal Insurance Administration. In that position he managed the National Flood Insurance Program and the now defunct Federal Riot Reinsurance Program and Federal Crime Insurance Program.

In taking his new post, Mr. Bragg leaves a job as senior vice president for Risk Enterprise Management, a provider of claims and risk management solutions to the property-casualty insurance industry. The company, based in Cranbury, N.J., is a subsidiary of Zurich Financial Services.

Previously, he was executive vice president and chief operations officer for Insurance Management Solutions Group, an application software and business process outsourcing provider to insurance companies, based in St. Petersburg, Fla.

David Farmer, senior vice president in the Washington, D.C. office of the Alliance of American, who knows Mr. Bragg from his past work in the Capital, said his background made him “uniquely qualified to implement the operational requirements of the program.”

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, March 31, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved. Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.