E&S/Specialty

Using his firm’s scoring method to gauge insurers’ financial strength, ALIRT Principal David Paul notes that specialty-insurer composite scores are less volatile than composites for the entire commercial-insurance industry over the long term.

The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan are spurring interest in the earthquake Difference In Conditions (DIC) product at V3 Insurance Partner, according to President and CEO Susan Rivera.

The second round of P&C earnings reports for the first quarter reveal differing strategies for the challenging workers’ comp line, struggles for regionals and rising retention rates for many primary carriers. The last trend may suggest the market is bottoming, P&C Insurance Analyst William Wilt notes.

Traditional loss reserving methods that assume past loss development patterns will repeat produced initial loss estimate that were 25 percent too low for some years during the last soft market, say Guy Carpenter, arguing for the use of modern statistical approaches.

Mark your calendars! NU provides highlights of the upcoming Target Market Program Administrators Midyear Meeting in Boston.

In spite of competitive conditions in the specialty program business segment, an insurance industry analyst doesn’t see any flashing red alerts signaling major troubles ahead for program carriers so far in 2011.

Jeremy Hitzig, CEO of Distinguished Programs and 2011 president of the Target Market Program Administrators Association, describes his firm’s strategies for achieving growth and efficiency, as well as ongoing initiatives at TMPAA.

It may have seemed like horrible timing when Susan Rivera was starting up a program business-focused MGA in late 2009, but there were several advantages to launching in the wake of a global financial crisis and about six years into a soft property and casualty insurance market, she says.