A number of insurance companies are among Fortune magazine’s 2021 ranking of the world’s most admired companies.
Berkshire Hathaway, at Number 6, tops the property/casualty firms listed, followed by USAA, Allstate, Chubb, Swiss Re, Travelers, and Zurich, respectively.
MetLife tops the life insurance companies included, followed by New York Life Insurance, Massachusetts Mutual Life, Northwestern Mutual, and Prudential Financial.
The survey asked respondents to rank companies using criteria including: products, quality of management, financial soundness, ability to attract talent, and social responsibility.
The rankings came out just in time for Insurance Careers Month. To find out more about why working in insurance can be such an attractive career choice, check out the stories told by people working in a variety of fields who sat down for interviews for our Insurance Careers Corner series.
Triple-I’s “Insurance Careers Corner” series was created to highlight trailblazers in insurance and to spread awareness of the career opportunities within the industry.
February is Insurance Careers Month, and this month we interviewed Suzanne Meraz, an external affairs executive at CSAA Insurance Group. Suzanne discusses why she chose a career in insurance, the impacts of the pandemic, and the importance of racial equity in the industry.
Suzanne Meraz
Tell me about your current role at CSAA.
As external affairs executive for a AAA insurer, I’m fortunate to work with a talented team that manages PR, social media, thought leadership, executive visibility, reputation management, and relationships with industry associations (like Triple-I, The Institutes). Our team works to promote CSAA Insurance Group and its associated companies, such as Mobilitas, our commercial insurance company, and Avanta Ventures, our venture capital arm.
You’ve worked in PR and Corporate Communications for many years. What led you into insurance and to make a career in the industry?
I’ve been fortunate to have worked in PR my whole career, and in insurance for about 15 years. Hewitt Associates, a consulting firm later acquired by Aon, is where I started working with insurance. I was responsible for promoting the healthcare practice, helping companies with their healthcare benefit programs.
Working in insurance has provided me the opportunity to promote and learn about innovative products and services, such as green and entertainment insurance, as well as multiple lines, including P&C, healthcare and medical malpractice. I’ve truly enjoyed these experiences and working with many talented and smart people, but I am also proud to be part of this noble profession. As society’s financial first responders, we’re making and delivering on a promise to people to be there for people in their time of need. It feels good to be working in an industry that is doing something positive for the economy, for people, and for communities.
2020 was a rough year for the insurance industry. Can you talk about some of the challenges that you’ve faced?
2020 was challenging on many levels, but I’m very proud of what we’ve done at our company and overall as an industry. At CSAA, we quickly transitioned employees to work from home while continuing to serve our customers well. Our industry wasn’t known for having a work-from-home culture, and we all surprised ourselves in a good way.
The pandemic also spurred a lot of innovation which allowed us to think about ways to do things differently. For example, CSAA created efficiencies that allowed us to introduce a touchless claims system, which enabled customers to share pictures and videos of auto damage claims versus handling in person. We have received a lot of positive feedback for this enhancement, since it saves a lot of time and makes the entire process much more convenient for customers.
As an industry, insurance has assisted customers and communities throughout the pandemic with donations and community service. The industry also took a stand on racial equity issues. There is so much more to do, but it’s important that we start to use our voice as an industry to support important issues that we are facing. Our industry needs to become more diverse and better reflect the communities that we’re serving.
Let’s talk about Diversity & Inclusion. It is the topic that’s front of mind in the industry, particularly lack of representation for women and people of color. What challenges have you faced and overcome during your career? What is CSAA’s commitment to D&I?
As a mixed race female (half Japanese and half Polish), I feel that I bring a unique perspective to the table. While the communications field has strong female representation overall, that doesn’t mean that we can’t improve or don’t face other challenges. Women in leadership positions and people-of-color still remain very under-represented.
During my career, I have encountered sexism and discrimination. It’s a challenge many of us face, but I’ve been fortunate enough to not allow it to derail my goals and aspirations. To this day, I am often asked “What are you?” in terms of my ethnicity. In time, I’ve learned that it’s not my problem that people can’t put me in a box or easily categorize me.
The insurance industry has traditionally been tight-lipped on many social issues, but one of my proudest moments was when our CEO, Tom Troy, publicly supported Black Lives Matter. Coming from a mixed family, it meant so much for my company to take that stand on this important issue and to say those words. I’m grateful to be a part of a company that cares about our employees, customers and communities, and isn’t afraid to speak out on injustice.
You’ve just been honored as part of the 2021 APCIA Class of Emerging Leaders for your work in 2020 and helping to navigate CSAA with challenges through the pandemic as well as promoting diversity and equity. What are your goals for 2021 and beyond?
It was such an honor to be recognized along with my other CSAA colleagues who are so deserving: Briana Clifford, Beti Cung, Jachyn Davis, Christian Myers, and Maureen Parish. We need more events that bring the insurance industry together, whether it’s by function or discipline, to keep the industry engaged and share the stories of how we’re making a difference.
I’m proud of CSAA’s inclusion and belonging work. Over the past year, we’ve explored diversity training around unconscious bias and micro-aggressions. We also have a CEO that is truly supportive in addressing racial inequity and providing the space, budget, and support to launch programs that address these issues. Just acknowledging that these are serious and important issues is a big deal, yet we’re taking the necessary steps that will help us move forward and take real action. We’re on a journey with this, and we are not perfect, but we are committed to increasing the diversity of our workforce and advocating for representation at every level of our organization.
There’s so much work to be done in this area that it sometimes can feel overwhelming, but our team is committed to advocating for real change that can make a difference for our company and the communities we serve. For us, this is not a bandwagon moment and ‘Black Lives Matter’ wasn’t just for 2020. Inclusion and belonging is now and forever, and we will continue to move forward with action and purpose. We are working on a CSR report that will document transparency about where we are, what we are doing, where we have work to do and where we are headed. This is an exciting, important and pivotal time for the insurance industry and the world, and I am grateful for the role we can play in influencing a positive and long overdue outcome.
The insurance industry is uniquely positioned to provide leadership in the public policy dialogue over climate risks. Our contribution to this conversation is crucial because insurers recognize the growing intensity of threats to the properties insurers financially protect.
In 2020, the U.S. witnessed a record hurricane season with 30 named storms; 12 of them made landfall. We also observed the worst wildfire season on record with more than 10 million acres burned—roughly the size of Maryland.
The U.S.’s auto, home, and business insurers cumulatively saw their catastrophe-caused insured loss payouts more than double to $47.1 billion for the first nine-months of 2020 from $21.5 billion in the same nine-month period a year earlier, Verisk and the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA) found.
The federal government quantified this trend, too. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), there were 22 weather and climate disasters in the U.S. in 2020. Damages from these disasters exceeded $1 billion each and totaled approximately $95 billion for all 22 events when including both insured and uninsured losses, NOAA estimated.
The demand for insurance industry involvement in addressing climate risks is urgent. With a new administration and Congressional majority, climate is a priority issue in Washington, D.C. Industry leaders would be wise to explore pro-actively climate risk solutions for business and society—and not wait for elected officials to prescribe a response.
I believe climate risk is a challenge that should be integrated into each insurer’s Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) framework. That means examining climate risk impacts on insurer investments, underwriting and operational priorities—and then managing all dimensions of those findings.
The Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (ORSA) framework is already in place. Adding additional resources to this process will provide further intelligence for how insurers ought to operate as we move forward. For example, at my company, we decided rather than wait for regulators to try to limit fossil fuel investments, we created a green energy portfolio. The idea was to create a position in non-carbon energy production—and be opportunistic as the economy transitions toward non-carbon alternatives.
We believe this transition can be done responsibly while still managing the primary mandate of securing financial strength for policyholders.
One of the biggest challenges we will likely face is rising consumer expectations. We also must remember the political arena often animates public expectations. As an industry, we have at times struggled to produce innovative products and services.
Whether its personal or commercial insurance, our consumers want offerings that are relevant for their individual needs, which today includes being more resilient to climate risk. Everyone in the financial sector faces these challenges but I am confident insurers have the insights and expertise to deliver the innovation required in our changing world.
Richard Creedon, Chairman of the Board and CEO of the member companies of the Utica National Insurance Group is also Chairman of the Insurance Information Institute’s Executive Leadership Committee
Social inflation – increasing insurance claims costs related to legislative and litigation trends – may be spreading beyond the United States, attendees were told at a webinar with the Greenberg School of Risk Management of St. John’s Tobin College of Business.
The webinar, held on February 10, was aimed to help lawyers and claims professionals understand the phenomenon, which is characterized by claims costs rising faster than general economic inflation can explain.
Annette Hofmann, Ph.D., professor of actuarial science at the Maurice R. Greenberg School of Risk Management, Insurance and Actuarial Science, pointed out that “though it is largely a U.S. issue, there are signs of social inflation in other countries with potential for further international contagion, albeit not to the same degree as in the U.S.”
She added that the impact of social inflation in the U.S. has been most evident in commercial auto liability insurance.
“Litigation finance, societal attitudes toward corporations and large jury payouts are all behind the phenomenon,” according to James Lynch, Chief Actuary of Triple-I and one of the presenters.
In his presentation, Lynch showed how incurred losses in commercial auto liability have been climbing steeply since 2010.
Lynch said Triple-I studied the link between social inflation and trends in actuarial data (rising loss development factors) by focusing on long-tailed liability lines including Commercial Auto, Medical Malpractice and Other Liability.
He said actuaries look at the pattern of reported losses – the sum of claims experts’ estimates of every known loss. Even if the ultimate amount of claims rises or falls from year to year, the pattern of emergence should stay the same. That hypothesis is at the core of standard actuarial practices.
In this case, it is increasing.
One interesting offshoot of this work is that actuaries can also predict how much in losses will be reported in any 12-month period. The chart on the right shows how actuaries analyzing countrywide data have not been able to do this in commercial auto. And this is not just happening in auto, medical malpractice occurrence, and other liability are seeing the same effect.
Lynch went on to discuss some of the potential reasons behind large jury payouts. One explanation is the darker view of life that people have. Confidence in government has plummeted, incomes and life expectancy have declined, and Google Trends indicates that searches for the word “dystopia” have increased by over 400 percent from 2005 to 2020.
In the meantime, Lynch and another presenter, Julie Campanini of Magna Legal Services, noted that huge amounts of money have been normalized by billion-dollar lottery jackpots, sky-high celebrity net-worth, and news reports of “nuclear” awards verdicts.
Other speakers included:
Jonathan E. Meer, partner at Wilson Elser, who spoke about the state of tort reform.
Jeff Cordray, a vice president and economist at Christensen Associates, who discussed the importance of determining economic damages, particularly when there is a potential for punitive damages in a case.
Insurers saw more costly personal umbrella claims before the start of 2020, according to a Gen Re analysis, and the reinsurer expects such claims to continue as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Personal umbrella insurance covers liability costs beyond the limits of the policyholders’ homeowners or auto policies.
Gen Re has uncovered some of the top drivers for the large claims, and they have to do with some of society’s harshest ills. Top reasons cited were increases in:
the annual poverty rate;
opioid prescription rates;
fatal accidents;
brain injuries;
attorney representation; and
injuries involving a fatality and multiple claimants.
Other notable predictors linked with higher claims severity include laws permitting recreational marijuana and a lack of motorcycle helmet laws.
Gen Re said poverty, opioid use, and marijuana laws were unexpected predictors of umbrella claim severity and that all of the analysis’ findings “will facilitate deeper client interaction on this line of business.”
“Social inflation” – a term used to describe growth in liability risks and costs related to litigation trends – has been a growing concern for insurers. The phenomenon has mostly affected the commercial auto and general liability lines, but the findings here – particularly the increase in attorney representation – suggest that it might be making inroads into personal lines.
By Loretta Worters, Vice President, Media Relations, Triple-I
During an exclusive Groundhog Day webinar presented to Triple-I members by Triple-I and Milliman, experts talked about what the insurance industry can expect in 2021.
Auto Insurance Report editor Brian Sullivan looked at both personal and commercial auto insurance. “For the first nine months, private passenger auto liability written premium was down less than two percent, but losses incurred were down more than 14 percent with loss ratios likely to be in the mid-50s.”
On the commercial side, Sullivan noted that commercial auto trends aren’t as powerful as those for personal lines. “Things have gotten better in terms of losses, but not that much better; certainly, nothing like personal auto,” Sullivan said.
Jeff Eddinger, senior division executive at the National Council for Compensation Insurance (NCCI), gave an early look at 2020 results for workers compensation insurance. “The pandemic has landed the U.S. economy into a recession. Significant job losses combined with changes in wage and rate levels have put downward pressure on premiums. NCCI estimates that private carrier net premium written will be down about 8 percent for 2020.”
Eddinger noted that as the virus began to spread in 2020, so did the concern that COVID claims could overwhelm the system. “Fortunately, that has turned out not to be the case. At the same time, there has been a drop in non-COVID claims, due in part to more remote work and less work-related driving. So far, incurred losses have decreased about 8 percent, in line with the drop in total premium. As a result, the estimated calendar year combined ratio for 2020 is almost unchanged from 2019 at 86. This would be the seventh straight year of underwriting profit for workers compensation.”
The industry is financially strong but continues to face uncertainty, Eddinger warned. “The vaccine rollout has begun, but new cases of the virus in the U.S. have soared to record levels. In addition to COVID claims, industry leaders are concerned about regulatory activity related to presumptions, the economic downturn and the long-term impact of working from home,” Eddinger said.
By Scott Holeman, Director, Media Relations, Triple-I
During Black History Month, we are sharing inspirational stories from Black business owners who are demonstrating resilience in these challenging times.
It’s been a tough year for many businesses, but Kansas City Bar-B-Que co-owner, Debbie Jones, shows that a little resilience and ingenuity brings a recipe for success.
By Loretta Worters, Vice President, Media Relations, Triple-I
A pandemic, civil unrest, and weather-related catastrophes impacted the U.S. property/casualty (P/C) insurance industry in 2020, but not to the extent that was originally feared.
Few predict a repeat of the events of 2020, yet new projections from the Insurance Information Institute (Triple-I) and Milliman envision strong premium growth for 2021 with an underwriting result comparable to last year.
Despite myriad challenges, U.S. auto, homeowners, and commercial insurers are projected to realize a modest 1.9 percent growth in net premiums written and to book a combined ratio of 98.9 through year-end 2020, according to Triple-I and Milliman. This year, net premiums written will increase 6.1 percent, and the combined ratio will improve slightly, to 98.5, the two organizations project. Net premiums written are premiums written after reinsurance transactions. The combined ratio is the percentage of each premium dollar a P/C insurer spends on claims and expenses.
“We think the year ended surprisingly well, given the difficult circumstances the industry found itself in,” said James Lynch, FCAS, senior vice president and chief actuary, Triple-I. “We project a slight underwriting profit in 2020, fairly similar to 2019. We project similar results over the next two years.”
The year-end 2020 projections, along with those for this year and next, were unveiled during a Triple-I members-only webinar on February 2, “Triple-I/Milliman Underwriting Projections 2021-2022: Groundhog Day Edition,” moderated by Triple-I CEO Sean Kevelighan.
P/C insurance industry premium growth will rebound in 2021, the Triple-I and Milliman projected, as the hard market in commercial lines will augment exposure growth from the economic recovery. Panelists also forecast continued underwriting profits through 2022, with projections for several major lines of business.
“Economists expect growth to improve this year and next, which will fuel growth in exposures in most lines,” said Jason B. Kurtz, FCAS, MAAA, a principal and consulting actuary at Milliman, an independent risk management, benefits, and technology firm.
Kurtz noted, however, that recent signs of slowdown are “concerning – retail sales fell in December, adjusted for the season and new jobless claims remain stubbornly high. So that may delay growth, as might the spread of so-called variant coronaviruses, which the CDC is expecting will dominate the cases in the spring.”
During the webinar, Dr. Michel Léonard, CBE, vice president and senior economist, Triple-I, took a preliminary look at third-quarter 2020 P/C insurance industry financial results.
The U.S. P/C insurers turned in a profitable performance in 2020’s third quarter, even as the industry’s net income dropped 26 percent for the second quarter in a row, according to Dr. Léonard. “While it was below the 10-year average, it was overall stronger than expected given the structurally low-rate environment yields and equity market volatility.”
Léonard concluded: “Prudent asset management and sound underwriting practices ensured the continued financial stability of the industry, even as we faced a uniquely challenging year, delivering on our contribution to systemic financial stability and commitment to policyholders.”
A new survey from the Insurance Research Council (IRC) finds that two-thirds of respondents worked from home at least part of the time during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey, conducted in October, also reveals half expect to continue working from home entirely or alternate between working and not working from home in the future.
Many consumers also expect to continue shopping on-line, with nearly half saying they expect to do less in-person shopping in retail stores even after the pandemic retreats. Both findings point to a continuing reduction in vehicle travel.
One-third of homeowners indicated they had undertaken substantial home improvement projects since the start of the pandemic. Significant home improvements have insurance implications to the extent that they increase the replacement cost of the home or, in some cases such as installing swimming pools, introduce additional liability risk. Other pandemic developments with possible impact on liability risk include the number of Americans adopting dogs (21 percent) or acquiring firearms (13 percent).
The study also explored attitudes toward economic conditions and steps taken in response. Half the respondents said they were concerned about their financial future; the most commonly cited actions taken were to reduce spending on travel and entertainment. A small percentage of respondents indicated that they had taken steps to reduce insurance spending, such as shopping for less expensive insurance or reducing coverage.
“This survey suggests the effects of COVID-19, including those impacting the property-casualty insurance industry, may continue even after the virus is under control,” said David Corum, CPCU, vice president of the IRC. “The results also reveal younger, urban, and lower income consumers have been more severely impacted by many economic aspects of the pandemic.”
The report, Consumer Responses to the Pandemic and Implications for Insurance, presents findings from the October 2020 survey of 2,147 adults who acknowledged some role in household insurance purchasing decisions.
For more information on the study’s methodology and findings, contact David Corum at (484) 831-9046 or by email at IRC@TheInstitutes.org.
ABOUT IRC: The Insurance Research Council (IRC) is a division of the Insurance Information Institute (Triple-I), the trusted source of unique, data-driven insights on insurance to inform and empower consumers. The IRC provides timely and reliable research to all parties involved in public policy issues affecting insurance companies and their customers. The IRC does not lobby or advocate legislative positions. It is supported by leading property-casualty insurance organizations.
