NU Online News Service, June 17, 1:20 p.m. EDT
The insurance industry needs to give greater support to nascent minority insurance producers or risk losing ground to the direct markets in the future, a New Jersey agents association president said.
Delivering her inaugural address at the Professional Insurance Agents of New Jersey and New York's joint conference in Atlantic City, earlier this week, Donna M. Cunningham told attendees that agents, carriers and the association need to give more support to minority agents.
The co-owner and president of ADP/Statewide Insurance Agencies Inc., in Cedar Knolls, N.J., said diverse minority populations, often identified as "emerging markets" by the industry, is set to account for 54 percent of the U.S. population by 2050.
However, the insurance industry's support for this new opportunity "is wanting," said Ms. Cunningham.
"It is time for all of us–agents, carriers and PIA–to develop an effective program that promotes relationships between producers from these markets and the carriers they must represent to serve their communities."
She said the association needs to "reinvent the approach" to support this market and PIA can be a catalyst to supporting "aspiring agency owners" to achieve success.
Simply giving an appointment "is short sighted," she continued, and no guarantee of success because running a successful agency goes beyond knowledge of insurance. She acknowledged that being able to build such a program would be no easy task.
"We are all well intentioned in our desire to help, but our go it alone approach is ineffective and counterproductive," Ms. Cunningham observed. "Acting as a team, we must develop a fully integrated mentoring program for emerging market producers…."
To this end, she proposed the expansion of PIA's Emerging Markets Task Force to include company representatives.
She warned that failure to effectively develop programs to deal with this market would allow the direct and exclusive writers to step into the void.
Ms. Cunningham also called on the association, agents and companies to take their common interest partnership to a new level, saying "we must do a better job of identifying our common ground and achieving our common goals. We need to maximize the natural synergy that exists among agents, companies and PIA."
"However you say it, working together is worth the effort and will make us all stronger," she observed. "If we can successfully accomplish the first goal we will naturally accomplish the second."
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