“California’s appellate courts are the first to hold e-commerce companies strictly liable for products sold on their sites,” ATRA writes in its 2021-2022 report. “Baseless Prop-65 lawsuits thrive in courts, and the volume of litigation continues to skyrocket.”
New York State is a close number two, ATRA says, “as the two jurisdictions battle it out for the most ‘no-injury’ class action lawsuits and the most claims under the ADA.” It adds that New York “is a preferred jurisdiction for asbestos litigation and, like California, the legislature ignores the need for reform and continues to push a liability-expanding agenda.”
Georgia has risen to number three on the basis of what ATRA calls the “significant deterioration” of its civil justice system.
“The Georgia Supreme Court eliminated apportionment of fault in certain cases and expanded bad faith liability for insurers,” ATRA says. “It also adopted an expansive view of jurisdiction of its courts over out-of-state businesses. Nuclear verdicts are bogging down business, and third-party litigation financing is playing an increasing role in litigation.”
Pennsylvania fell from number one to number four, but ATRA says this “was in no way a reflection of progress or improvements made in the state, but rather indicative of the number of issues plaguing other jurisdictions.”
ATRA is a Washington, D.C.-based group formed in 1986 and dedicated to tort and liability reform. It has published the Judicial Hellholes report since 2002.
Cyber incidents are the top threat to businesses, according to the latest Allianz Risk Barometer survey, up from third place in 2021. This result follows several significant data breaches and hacks last year, including the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, which caused a six-day shutdown and cost the company $4.4 million to regain access to its systems.
Business interruption fell to the second most important concern in a year marked by the continued presence of the coronavirus pandemic, cyberattacks, and natural catastrophes. Still, the report notes that the pandemic “has exposed the fragility and complexity of modern supply chains and how multiple events can come together to cause problems, raising awareness of the need for greater resilience and transparency.”
Natural catastrophe risk ranks third on the list – a jump from sixth in 2021. Global insured catastrophe losses increased to $112 billion in 2021, the fourth highest on record, according to Swiss Re.
While cyber is ranked as a more immediate threat to business than climate change, the report says these two perils are “linked by the fact that two of the most significant impacts expected from changes in legislation and regulation (the fifth top risk) in 2022 will be around big tech and sustainability.”
Pandemic outbreak fell to fourth place for 2022, with many companies comfortable that they are now better prepared for the consequences of these occurrences. According to the report, 80 percent of respondents believe they are “adequately” or “well” prepared.
The 11th annual report was developed from a late 2021 survey of 2,650 risk management experts from 89 countries and territories, including Allianz customers, brokers, industry trade organizations, risk consultants, and underwriters, with a focus on large- and small to mid-size companies.
Construction material costs rose dramatically in 2021, altering the underwriting and pricing of commercial property insurance. A recent report by Westchester – Chubb’s excess and surplus specialty product group – details the causes of rising commercial property insurance prices and how they can be mitigated.
The report cites three main factors driving the increase:
More frequent and severe insured losses due to extreme weather;
A supply chain crisis that has generated higher costs for construction materials; and
Rising inflation, which totaled nearly 7 percent in December 2021 from the previous year’s period and is the largest one-year increase in the past 40 years.
Weather, extreme and unpredictable
According to NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, there were 20 weather-related disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion occurred in the United States between January and September 2021. Between 1980 and 2020, the average number of these types of losses was seven.
In the first half of 2021, about $42 billion in insured property losses were recorded by the insurance industry, representing the highest figure in a decade, according to Swiss Re.
Despite this dramatic rise in losses, the report says, catastrophe risk models “may not fully capture the potential losses attributable to unusual weather events like the December 2021 tornado outbreak, Hurricane Ida, and Winter Storm Uri.” The unpredictability of these storms, alongside a need for better hydrological, topological, and geospatial data gathering and analysis, continues to pose a threat for insurers trying to anticipate risks associated with commercial properties.
Supply chain
2021 also saw a fluctuation of pricing changes for many materials — particularly those used for building – courtesy of the pandemic’s disruption of the global supply chain. Although the exorbitant lumber prices fell in the second half of the year, the prices of materials like copper piping and tubing dramatically increased, according to the report. This posed a challenge for insurers to approximate future costs for underwriting and pricing purposes.
If an unexpected major storm hits a heavily populated region, thousands of homes may need to be repaired or replaced at the same time, pushing the cost of goods and labor – and, ultimately, insurance – even higher. In November 2021, the report says, it was estimated that commercial properties were undervalued for insurance underwriting purposes by more than 30 percent.
Inflation
In addition to pandemic-driven cost increases, underwriters are concerned about the broader inflation picture and its potential impact on interest rates.
“High inflation of the 1970s and early 1980s, for example, adversely affected the industry, resulting in weaker underwriting performance and reserve levels,” the report says. “Rising interest rates, on the other hand, deteriorated the value of fixed income assets.”
Economists recently polled by Reuters said they expect the U.S. Federal Reserve to tighten monetary policy to tame persistently high inflation at a much faster pace than they believed a month earlier.
Where do we go from here?
Westchester’s report offers several strategies to help combat rising commercial property insurance costs:
Insurers, reinsurers, modeling firms, brokers, and risk managers need to develop more accurate and near-real-time data on building condition, drainage systems, real estate trends, and access to construction materials and labor;
Risk managers and property owners should consider entering agreements with contractors before weather events to ensure that materials and services are available when the need arises;
To ensure more comprehensive underwriting of a building’s replacement value, more frequent and in-depth property damage risk appraisals from qualified sources are needed; and
Insurers should consider upgrading loss prevention services provided to commercial property owners and rewarding policyholders with discounts and credits for taking certain risk-mitigation measures.
A recent survey of insurance underwriters found that 40 percent of their time is spent on “tasks that are not core” to underwriting. The top three reasons they cited are:
Redundant inputs/manual processes;
Outdated/inflexible systems; and
Lack of information/analytics at the point of need.
The survey – conducted by The Institutes and Accenture – also found that underwriting quality processes and tools are at their lowest point since the survey was first conducted in 2008. Only 46 percent of the 434 underwriters who responded said they believe their frontline underwriting practices are “superior” – which is down 17 percent from 2013.
“While underwriters believe technology changes have improved underwriting performance, 64 percent said their workload has increased or had no change with technology investments,” Christopher McDaniel, president at The Institutes Catastrophe Resiliency Council, told attendees at Triple-I’s Joint Industry Forum.
The survey’s findings with respect to talent may shed some light on this. The number of organizations viewed as having “superior” talent management capabilities for underwriting fell 50 percent since 2013 across almost every measure of performance evaluated.
“Training, recruiting, and retention planning had some of the biggest drops, particularly for personal lines,” McDaniel said. About a quarter of personal lines underwriters said they view their company’s talent management programs as deficient. That rate rose to 41 percent for talent retention; 37 percent for in succession planning; 33 percent for in training; and 30 percent for recruiting
“While technology investment may have improved underwriting performance” in terms of risk evaluation, quoting, and selling, McDaniel said those improvements “appear to have come at the expense of training and retaining underwriting talent,” McDaniel said.
A McKinsey study that assessed the potential impact of automation on functions like underwriting, actuarial, claims, finance, and operations at U.S and European companies found that as underwriting becomes more technical in nature it also will require more social skills and flexibility. Respondents to the McKinsey survey said automation and analytics-driven processes will produce a greater need for “soft skills” to shape and interpret quantitative outputs. Adaptability will also become more important for underwriters to stay responsive to changing risks and learn new techniques as technology changes.
“Underwriters will not become programmers themselves,” the McKinsey report said, “but they will work extensively with colleagues in newer digital and data-focused roles to develop and manage underwriting solutions.”
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a hot topic, gaining attention from pop culture to the business press. Most of this notoriety has been associated with the buying and selling of digital collectibles, but the underlying blockchain technology and this specific application of it have implications for tangible assets and for insuring both digital and physical properties.
For this reason, the Institutes RiskStream Collaborative – the risk-management and insurance industry’s first enterprise-level blockchain consortium – recently launched a free educational series about NFTs.
What are NFTs?
“Non-fungible” means an object is unique and can’t be replaced with something else. A dollar is fungible – you can trade it for another dollar bill or four quarters or specific numbers of other coins, and you still have exactly one dollar. An individual bitcoin is fungible. A one-of-a-kind trading card isn’t fungible – if you trade it for a different card, you would have a different thing, and you would lose possession of your original card.
NFTs are unique digital markers that can be associated with an asset to identify it as one-of-a-kind.
In the second episode, the RiskStream Collaborative brings in Jakub Krcmar, CEO of Veracity Protocol, to discuss the concepts of computer vision, digital twins, and NFTs of physical products. The ability to create a unique digital twin of exact replicas – like identical baseball cards or identical automobile gears – to create an NFT may have major insurance implications. One example was the potential for NFTs to be associated with high-value physical objects to demonstrate authenticity of ownership and reduce or eliminate fraud opportunities.
Episode three features Natalia Karayaneva, CEO of Propy, who explains the potential for NFTs in real estate transactions. She highlights some of the benefits of the NFT approach, underscoring the efficiencies brought to primarily paper-intensive processes. The potential for insurance also is discussed.
In episode four, Kaleido CEO Steve Cerveny wraps up the series by describing the tokens themselves. He highlights the ability to create NFTs to represent any asset. These tokens are programmable “things” on a blockchain, which can help with business processes. Blockchains are basically ledgers or databases. Like any ledger, they record transactions; unlike traditional ledgers, however, blockchains are distributed across networked computer systems. Anyone with an internet connection and access to the blockchain can view and transact on the chain.
This open, consensus-based nature of blockchain – with everyone on the chain checking the validity of every transaction according to an established set of rules – enables conflicts to be resolved automatically and transparently to all participants. This dispenses with the need for a central authority to enforce trust and allows participants to build in automation through smart contracts.
The Riskstream Collaborative is the largest blockchain consortium in insurance, with over 30 carriers, brokers, and reinsurers as members who lead governance and activity. An “associate member ecosystem” is beginning to be established, and RiskStream is inspecting use cases in personal lines, commercial lines, reinsurance, and life and annuities.
Homeowners insurance premium rates are rising faster than inflation, S&P Global Market Intelligence data shows, and Triple-I’s chief insurance officer says they’re likely to keep climbing.
From 2017 through 2020, premium rates are up 11.4 percent on average countrywide, according to S&P. Recent factors include rising material costs and supply-chain disruptions that are driving up home-replacement costs — and insurers are adjusting premiums accordingly. The countrywide average annual premium has increased to $1,398 in 2021.
“From everything I know about homeowners’ risk, I expected those numbers to be higher,” Triple-I’s Dale Porfilio told the Washington Post. “Honestly, I would say they still should go up further.”
Most mortgage lenders require borrowers to carry homeowners insurance. According to a recent Bankrate.com analysis, the average homeowner spends about 1.91 percent of household income on home insurance. Location often drives costs up, particularly if the house is in an area prone to natural disasters. Some areas have higher rates because it costs more to rebuild a house there.
Porfilio said insured damage from tornados, hurricanes, severe storms, wildfires and other natural disasters has reached $82 billion in 2021, bringing the total from 2017 through 2021 to more than $400 billion. As the chart below shows, average insured natural catastrophe losses have increased nearly 700 percent since the 1980s.
“Climate risk is continuing to put pressure on all things weather-related,” Porfilio said. “We are seeing more severe hurricanes, more severe wildfires, and the science isn’t as clear on tornado events in terms of whether they’re changing in frequency or not. But what we definitely do know is that severity is going up.”
When a natural disaster affects a wide area, the demand for materials and labor puts pressure on prices.
On top of the extreme-weather and population shifts that have been driving up insurers’ costs and, in turn, policyholders’ premiums, add the impacts of the pandemic-driven supply-chain disruptions.
“When the pandemic hit, lumber producers feared a repeat of the Great Recession,” the Washington Post reported. “They cut production and unloaded inventory. But demand soared, catching them by surprise. The price of lumber spiked to $1,500 per thousand feet of board in March, a 400 percent year-over-year increase.”
At Triple-I’s 2021 Joint Industry Forum (JIF) on Thursday, December 2, CEO Sean Kevelighan challenged attendees to ponder a question: “What do we know about the new normal?”
In his opening presentation and a sit-down with NBC correspondent Contessa Brewer, Kevelighan shared insights on how the emerging post-pandemic reality is transforming how the world manages risk. Panel discussions highlighted critical issues facing the industry, including cyber risk, runaway litigation, and cultivating resilience in a world that will continue to face unprecedented natural and economic threats.
Kevelighan and other experts from across academia, media, and industry described how the pandemic fallout, along with other evolving threats to communities and businesses, demanded innovation at breakneck speed.
“Insurance is at the center” of this change, said Kevelighan. The industry has the opportunity to continue its role as the “leading voice in terms of creating more resilience.”
Peter Miller, president and CEO of The Institutes, took the stage later to speak about how the insurance world can optimally position itself for the benefits and hurdles of the coming year.
Technology, he said, can be a valuable tool to “provide a much clearer picture of risk.” He opened the door for cooperation with a call to action: “If you have an issue collaboration idea, give me a shout.”
Technology and collaboration as critical ingredients for success in the new paradigm was a recurrent theme throughout the forum.
Dale Porfilio, Triple-I’s chief insurance officer, moderated a panel on cyber risk. This peril continues to grow, driving profits – but also premiums – upward. Panelists estimated $28 billion in cyber premiums by 2026.
Chris Beck, managing director at Milliman Inc., Catherine Mulligan, global head of cyber for Aon, and Paul Miskovich, global business leader for Pango Group, shared their thoughts on how the market could be stabilized, with the government playing a pivotal role as legislative enforcer and data aggregator.
Dr. Michel Léonard, Triple-I vice president and senior economist, shared insights on the economic challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for insurance and risk managers. In 2021, industry growth lagged U.S. growth, with 1.10 percent for insurance versus 5.8 percent for overall U.S. growth.
Leonard believes that recovery, albeit uneven, will continue and growth will be strong – just not enough to make up for the contraction. He said he doesn’t expect overall pre-pandemic levels to return until 2024.
Re-imagining risk management in the new normal also requires finding effective ways to address two elephants in the room: the talent gap and “runaway litigation”.
Frank Tomasello, executive director of the Institutes Griffith Foundation, moderated a panel that explored the impact of litigation trends on claims expenses and, ultimately, policyholder premiums.
A panel featuring representatives from State Farm, Swiss Re, and The Hartford discussed the challenges of recruiting and retaining talent amid the Great Resignation. The rising generations – millennials and Gen Z – have different career goals and expectations for their employers, such as more diverse workplaces.
As Deepi Soni, executive vice president and CIO at The Hartford, put it: “We said oil is gold. We said data is gold. Talent is diamond.”
Insurers – beyond their traditional role as financial first responders – are helping policyholders mitigate the risks posed by natural disasters and cyber threats, panelists at a Joint Industry Forum (JIF) panel said.
The JIF’s C-Suite on Resilience panel was moderated by John Huff, president and CEO of the Association of Bermuda Insurers and Reinsurers (ABIR). It included Richard Creedon, CEO, Utica Mutual Insurance Company; Paul Horgan, Head of U.S. National Accounts, Zurich North America; John Smith, CEO, Pennsylvania Lumbermens Mutual Insurance Company; and Rohit Verma, CEO, Crawford & Co.
“2021 has been a year of risk that has certainly challenged us,” ABIR’s Huff said. “Eighteen events in the U.S. alone, with over a billion dollars an event. Just a few years ago, those types of numbers would be unheard of, not to mention the 538 deaths and significant economic losses.”
Hurricane Ida, a Category 4 storm that made landfall in Louisiana in August, and the Dixie Fire, which burned 1 million acres in California over four months, were two of the most devastating national disasters this year.
“One recurring theme that we can talk about, especially with hurricanes and wildfires, is that we have growth in population in areas that are significantly impacted by these threats,” said Phil Klotzbach, PhD, a research scientist at Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science, and a Triple-I non-resident scholar, in introductory remarks.
Huff started the discussion by noting that the notion of resilience seems to have evolved from preparedness to meet and rebound from large, single events like hurricane, earthquake, or wildfire.
“It seems we may have entered a new period for leadership to think of resilience more broadly,” he said. “I’m thinking of the interconnectedness of businesses, individuals, and communities through technology and global commerce; the supply-chain and labor-force disruptions we’ve experienced due to the pandemic; cyber risks, which is such a growing market for our industry but also a growing risk for our global economy. Have risk and resilience fundamentally changed in recent years? Or are we just having to adjust to viewing them through a new lens?”
“There’s certainly a lot more to think about,” said Utica Mutual’s Creedon. “The opportunity moment for us is that there’s market need and expertise we have to expand beyond the traditional risk-transfer product.”
He noted that the industry has historically thought about risk and resilience “in balance-sheet terms, we’re building up large reservoirs of capital and surplus for that large capital- and surplus-draining event that’s going to happen. But nowadays capital is fairly cheap and abundant – it’s almost a renewable resource – and that kind of makes the risk-transfer product more commoditized and sort of a race to the bottom on pricing and product.”
The opportunity lies in insurers’ ability to augment their traditional capabilities with risk management, loss control, and other services to have an impact for consumers, he noted.
“It’s not, in my mind, a fundamental shift in what we define as risk,” said Pennsylvania Lumbermens’ Smith. “It’s that there are so many coming at us. As I think about risk, I do a lot of listening. That’s why I’m here today, why I’m part of [Triple-I] I want to hear different perspectives.”
Zurich’s Horgan drew a contrast between U.S. insurers and their European counterparts, which, he said, “have been focused on climate change for a much longer time. Zurich has been monitoring its environmental footprint since 2007, has been net neutral since 2014, has signed on to U.N. agreements. These are things that have been hotly debated in the U.S., but they’re buying in.”
“Our customers are craving for insights,” Horgan continued. “These are evolving risks. Some of them are insurable, some of them are not. [Our customers] are looking to us for data. They know where they’ve got to be, and they know they have this journey to get there.”
“I think about resilience as being able to recover from adversity, able to recover from a loss, or prevent that loss from having any impact on you,” Crawford’s Verma said. “It’s impressive to see what the industry has done. Where there’s a gap is, if the industry was a playing field, everyone is playing like a quarterback, and if everyone is playing like a quarterback you can’t win.”
Verma said his concern is whether the industry is coming together as a team to “rethink the ecosystem of insurance – the brokers, the claims providers, the carriers” to have a meaningful impact on resilience.
Retaining and recruiting talent has been a priority for years, but the pandemic changed how insurers approach these needs, a panel of experts concluded at Triple-I’s Joint Industry Forum (JIF) last week.
The panel examined whether insurers’ growing comfort with remote work will lead to a more diverse workforce and if technological advances would give insurance industry employees more time to create value rather than allocating too much time toward administrative assignments.
“This industry offers so much to so many,” said Connecticut Insurance Commissioner Andrew Mais. “The pandemic accelerated the need for new talent. By casting a wider net, we can find new entrants who want to do meaningful work and make a difference. Attracting data scientists and new skill sets to the industry broadens our reach to new talent.”
“The pandemic accelerated our level of engagement with employees” said Deepa Soni, chief information officer for The Hartford. “We are championing mental health, supporting women in tech, caring for the whole person. The acquisition of new talent brings transformation to the insurance industry through flexibility, culture and purpose-driven work.”
Soni added that more flexible working arrangements have increased employee retention at The Hartford.
Victor Terry, State Farm’s chief diversity officer, said, “Start with the individual. What do they need to be their best and thrive? Redefine what the culture is and what does ‘good’ look like.”
“Vulnerability is a key trait for good leaders,” said panel moderator Lisa Butera, managing director and head of property/casualty client markets – U.S. for Swiss Re. “Leadership with empathy and authenticity is key.”
Butera said the industry is shifting to new technology to better serve customers and make work more efficient and “less clunky” for employees.
“Training existing employees and attracting new employees with tech skills will help to fill the current talent gaps,” Butera added.
The Hartford’s Soni noted her company offers a tech boot camp for claims professionals and underwriters, and State Farm’s Terry added, “New tech allows innovation and creativity – more time for passion projects.”
Learn More About Insurance Talent on the Triple-I Blog
Cybersecurity is no longer an emerging risk but a clear and present one for organizations of all sizes, panelists on a panel at Triple-I’s Joint Industry Forum (JIF) said. This is due in large part to the fact that cybercriminals are increasingly thinking and behaving like businesspeople.
“We’ve seen a large increase in ransomware attacks for the sensible economic reason that they are lucrative,” said Milliman managing director Chris Beck. Cybercriminals also are becoming more sophisticated, adapting their techniques to every move insurers, insureds, and regulators make in response to the latest attack trends. “Because this is a lucrative area for cyber bad actors to be in, specialization is happening. The people behind these attacks are becoming better at their jobs.”
As a result, the challenges facing insurers and the customers are increasing and becoming more complex and costly. Cyber insurance purchase rates reflect the growing awareness of this risk, with one global insurance broker finding that the percentage of its clients who purchased this coverage rose from 26 percent in 2016 to 47 percent in 2020, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) stated in a May 2021 report.
Panel moderator Dale Porfilio, Triple-I’s chief insurance officer, asked whether cyber is even an insurable risk for the private market. Panelist Paul Miskovich, global business leader for the Pango Group, said cyber insurance has been profitable almost every year for most insurers. Most cyber risk has been managed through more controls in underwriting, changes in cybersecurity tools, and modifications in IT maintenance for employees, he said.
By 2026, projections indicate insurers will be writing $28 billion annually in gross written premium for cyber insurance, according to Miskovich. He said he believes all the pieces are in place for insurers to adapt to the challenges presented by cyber and that part of the industry’s evolution will rely on recruiting new talent.
“I think the first step is bringing more young people into the industry who are more facile with technology,” he said. “Where insurance companies can’t move fast enough, we need partnerships with managing general agents, with technology and data analytics, who are going to bring in data and new information.”
“Reinsurers are in the game,” said Catherine Mulligan, Aon’s global head of cyber, stressing that reinsurers have been doing a lot of work to advance their understanding of cyber issues. “The attack vectors have largely remained unchanged over the last few years, and that’s good news because underwriters can pay more attention to those particular exposures and can close that gap in cybersecurity.”
Mulligan said reinsurers are committed to the cyber insurance space and believe it is insurable. “Let’s just keep refining our understanding of the risk,” she said.
When thinking about the future, Milliman’s Beck stressed the importance of understanding the business-driven logic of the cybercriminals.
If, for example, “insurance contracts will not pay if the insured pays the ransom, the logic for the bad actor is, ‘I need to come up with a ransom schema that I’m still making money’,” but the insured can still pay without using the insurance contract.
This could lead to a scenario in which the ransom demands become smaller, but the frequency of attacks increases. Under such circumstances, insurers might have to respond to demand for a new kind of product.
