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Measuring and forecasting inflation is important in setting premiums and anticipating claims. Historically, recessions tend to drive prices down, but that’s not necessarily true for insurance.
This presentation by Triple-I Chief Economist Dr. Steven Weisbart looks at insurance prices and the forces that affect them.
On May 21, Triple-I CEO Sean Kevelighan testified before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Small Business Committee on the subject of business interruption coverage.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, some legislators and advocates have pushed for policies that would retroactively force insurers to pay for claims their insurance policies were not priced to cover. The U.S. House session, “Business Interruption Coverage: Are Policyholders Being Left Behind?,” gave members of the committee the opportunity to hear from policyholders and other interested stakeholders.
“An event like a global pandemic is uninsurable,” said Kevelighan in his statement. “Unlike a typical covered catastrophe, which is limited in terms of geography and time, pandemics have the potential to impact everywhere, all at once…. As such, this type of magnitude requires government resources to step in and provide support.”
Property business insurance, in general, is meant to cover physical damage from perils like fire, tornado, or hurricane,” he said. Forcing insurers to cover losses related to the pandemic – which don’t involve physical damage to property – would cost the industry between $150 billion to $400 billion per month.
“Make no mistake; retroactive business interruption payouts would bankrupt insurers,” said Kevelighan. “A recent Triple-I economic analysis determined this type of approach would decimate the industry’s financial resources in a matter of months, and at a time it needs those monies for major natural disasters that insurance policies cover, such as tornadoes, hurricanes, and wildfires.”
“Any efforts to retroactively rewrite business interruption policies are not only unconstitutional (Article I) but would imperil the insurance industry’s ability to pay covered insurance claims filed by American homeowners, drivers, and injured workers,” Kevelighan said.
“The current government shut-down orders do not trigger the vast majority of standard business interruption policies because those orders do not qualify as direct physical loss to property—a requirement under the policies,” he said.
“The insurance industry is stepping up for Americans, with the likes of $10.5 billion in personal auto insurance premium relief, $220 million in charitable donations, and even more by keeping nearly two million Americans employed so insurance customers will be covered, and have their claims handled, when other disasters strike,” Kevelighan concluded.
View the full testimony and a recording of the webcast here.
The insurance industry is united in its position that pandemics are uninsurable, and the industry has some formidable support in that view. In a letter to the committee, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) said: “The current COVID-19 crisis has highlighted that many existing business interruption (BI) policies have specific exclusions for viruses or other diseases, and coverage is generally only triggered by actual physical damage. Therefore, these policies were generally not designed or priced to provide coverage for claims arising from COVID-19.”
The NAIC letter said that the group opposes efforts to legislatively apply business interruption coverage retroactively to claims based on COVID-19 and “has serious concerns that requiring retroactive coverage of BI claims based on COVID-19 would pose significant risks to the solvency of insurance companies and could have systemic impacts on the industry as a whole and potentially the financial system.”
And in a letter to President Trump on May 18, six Republican Senators warned that altering insurance law to cover all pandemic claims under business interruption policies would devastate the capital reserved for paying other insurance claims.
Most insurance experts believe legislative proposals that would require insurers to cover business-interruption (BI) claims stemming from COVID-19 related shutdowns, even if the insurance policies exclude pandemic-related losses, threaten the solvency of the insurance industry. This is the finding of a survey conducted by the Wisconsin School of Business and the Center for Insurance Policy and Research of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC).
The survey also found most experts believe the private market will have a difficult time efficiently supplying BI coverage for pandemics, given the systemic, correlated, and non-diversifiable nature of the peril.
Many survey respondents felt only the federal government can provide coverage for correlated risks because it can spread the cost through taxation, long-run borrowing, and deficit financing. But whether provided by only the federal government or the private market, the pricing and affordability of coverage were indicated to be issues for both.
Most said they believe the private market can supply BI coverage for pandemics with an effective federal partnership. Some questioned whether the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program (TRIP) is a good model for pandemic insurance, given the similarities between the pandemic and terrorism perils.
The complete survey can be found here.
On May 18 the Insurance Information Institute (Triple-I) announced the launch of the Future of American Insurance & Reinsurance (FAIR) campaign. FAIR will focus on ensuring the insurance industry is able to sustain its longstanding role as the country’s backbone of economic growth and stability.
FAIR is being set into motion as the country seeks a pathway to economic recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As communities reopen and restart, insurers will play a critical role in the process, continuing to provide financial protection for the millions of Americans who depend on them for indemnification from risks they rightfully insured. Yet the industry is threatened with growing calls to retroactively alter insurance policies, cover the economic cost of widespread closures, and adjust workers’ compensation criteria, among other new developments.
“FAIR was created to safeguard the ability of the insurance industry to support its customers at a time when policymakers, the business community, and the general public are searching for solutions to our ongoing economic turmoil. And while we recognize the need for financial relief is severe, any attempts to make insurers retroactively responsible for a global pandemic puts the solvency of many insurers at risk,” said Sean Kevelighan, CEO, Triple-I.
“While the insurance industry has been doing its part to step up and support their communities in this time of crisis, pandemics are fundamentally uninsurable events. The federal government remains the only entity with the financial resources to help businesses recover from a systemic event of this magnitude. With the support of the public sector and the innovation of groups like insurers in the private sector, we can come together to work toward recovering from this catastrophe and build a more resilient future,” he added.
Insurance carriers are an integral part of local communities across the country, employing over 2.7 million Americans and contributing nearly $565 billion to the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2018. The industry has cumulatively offered consumers more than $10 billion in premium relief on auto insurance this spring and made over $220 million in charitable donations to COVID-19-related causes.
FAIR will serve as a go-to educational resource for the media, business community, and broader public in the coming weeks and will actively engage in a variety of insurance and COVID-19-related developments across America.
For more information visit fairinsure.org and follow @FAIRInsure on Twitter.
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. This month Kris Maccini, director, social media, Triple-I, interviewed Demetrius Gray, Founder & CEO of WeatherCheck.
WeatherCheck, an insurtech that analyzes weather data to help insurers predict severe weather impact to properties, was a finalist in 2019’s Resiliency Innovation Challenge.
Demetrius shared insights for building and growing his innovative business, and how he’s advising on severe weather prep amid the pandemic.
Name: Demetrius Gray
Current Role: Founder & CEO
Years at WeatherCheck: 3.5
Tell us about WeatherCheck? What led you to found this company and build your career in insurance?
I was a storm contractor. I chased hailstorms across the continental United States. Most of my work was around understanding insurance losses, and it gave me an intimate knowledge, which I used to create WeatherCheck. While there are numerous weather-related sources, there wasn’t a great place to assess whether something was damaged or not. For example, would an event at a particular property rise to the level that the insured should file a claim?
The insurance industry today is already thinking about creating efficiencies in the claims process. We allow property owners to sign up on WeatherCheck, type in any address in the country, and it exposes severe weather loss associated with that property. We work from the premise that informed people make informed decisions. At our core, WeatherCheck works to give people quality information so that they can make the right decision at the right time.
We’re in the middle of a significant global catastrophe. How has this impacted your business and conversations around severe weather?
When the shutdown started happening [throughout the stay at home orders], we had conversations with emergency managers around the country on what does emergency management look like for people at home. Normally, they would be at their office and those structures are built and fortified better than the average single-family home in the country. What we have seen is an increase in overall hazard-related deaths this year. The 2020 tornado season has killed more people than it has in the past few years because people are sheltering in place at home and risk is greater. We are preparing for these insights now, and we expect to see even greater risks heading into summer heat waves.
There is also an infinite question about the current infrastructure. Normally, people are placed into shelters post event, but that infrastructure has been displaced largely because the volunteers have been displaced. The inverse of that conversation is that the risk has been shifted to commercial enterprises and hotels. If the hotels are closed, then it’s where do we shelter people who have been displaced? We’re encouraging community partners to have conversations with stakeholders around planning, including reopening hotels for evacuations quickly.
Over the next year, what is top of mind as you grow your business?
Partnerships are important. We have been working with partners across all sectors to continue to grow the product itself. How do we help individuals who don’t necessarily understand their risks or the policies that they’ve purchased to get what they need? The way we’ll do that well over the next 12-24 months is by partnering with stakeholders who also have interest in that same asset. Whether that’s mortgage companies, cities, or banks–that’s where we’ll be focused while continuing to represent the interests of the insurers.
What setbacks have you faced in building your business and how did you move past them?
We’re the only black-owned meteorology company in the entire country. You get a whole lot more ‘no’s’ than ‘yes’s’ and those answers are based on unconscious biases. We had to be very honest with ourselves about what are bias characteristics–whether it’s race, gender, location–and we had to decide in the business plan how we were going to overcome those biases. For us, it meant that maybe venture capital (VC) wasn’t going to be a strong path for us because the data doesn’t prove out that they would invest in a woman or minority-run company. We built a profitable business with strategy based on data and that also influenced what the product looked like.
Through this process, we decided to go direct to policyholders. The data showed us that policyholders are largely unbiased and that they want what they want when they want it. If you have what they want, they will forgo internal biases to make their buying decisions. By focusing on the data and taking out the emotion, it allowed us to see viable prospects up front.
What are your goals for the future in terms of where you want to take your career and your business?
In the future, I could see WeatherCheck offering other products and services to get the insured at a place of homeostasis that is far better than what it is today. If we look at the number of individuals who are underinsured for flood or underinsured for fire–the system really sits at the nexus of being able to drive some of that. We’ll probably see some unique boutique offerings come out of selling new insurance products geared at solving those challenges. We’ll be driving better data to continue to inform decisions. We’d like to empower agents and brokers throughout the country to do an even better job of keeping the insured better informed. Agents and brokers will play an impactful role in continuing to drive value. It is very personal when people have a loss from an event and that personal pipeline is a far better approach than a chatbot or AI.
On May 14 the Insurance Information Institute (Triple-I), co-hosted a webinar with ResilientH20 Partners that focused on managing extreme weather events in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The panelists discussed the changing role of stakeholders across the private sector, governments and non-profit/NGOs.
The panelists drew from their backgrounds across government, business and insurance to discuss the immediate challenges stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, the downturn in the economy, and near-term flood and storm threats.
Click here to view a recording of the webinar.
Co-hosts:
Panelists:
Moderator:
Some of the key takeaways include:
This webinar is the first in a new series of thought leadership sessions that aims to be a catalyst for public-private-partnerships focused on enhancing pre-disaster risk mitigation at each step of the resilience value-chain, from financing to development, management, technology selection and crisis-management.
The Atlantic hurricane season starts on Monday, June 1, but could get an early start this weekend with Tropical Storm Arthur.
The U.S. Treasury Department issued a letter to members of Congress on May 8 which argued that proposals to force insurers to retroactively change business interruption (BI) policies to pay losses arising from the COVID-19 pandemic threaten the ability of the industry to serve policyholders and might lead to the insolvency of the industry.
In the letter, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Frederick Vaughan writes: “While insurers should pay valid claims, we share your concerns that these proposals fundamentally conflict with the contractual nature of insurance obligations and could introduce stability risks to the industry.”
He goes on to say that the Treasury will collaborate with insurer groups, federal lawmakers and states on “addressing losses attributable to the current and potential future pandemics.”
On May 8 the Labor Department reported that the U.S. labor market lost a historic 20.5 million nonfarm jobs in April, sending the unemployment rate to 14.7 percent. The worst affected sectors are leisure and hospitality, which lost 7.7 million workers.
Dr. Steven Weisbart, Triple-I’s chief economist, points out that the employment data for March 2020* for the insurance industry are startling largely because they are at odds with employment changes in many other lines of work.
* The insurance industry/sector-specific data are not seasonally adjusted and are one month behind the national data.
U.S. auto insurers will return over $10 billion to their customers nationwide, according to an Insurance Information Institute estimate, in response to reduced driving during the pandemic.
We’ve listed many of the companies that are offering refunds here and here. These lists are not exhaustive, so be sure to check with your insurer to see if they are offering refunds or credits. All premium and rate adjustments are subject to regulatory approval.
On May 5, Allstate Corp. CEO Tom Wilson said the insurer would probably grant another rebate to auto insurance customers. The second round of rebates would vary according to region. On April 6, the insurer announced that it would return more than $600 million in premiums to its policyholders because the nation’s drivers were traveling 40 percent to 55 percent fewer miles following stay-at-home orders. Wilson noted that American drivers are now traveling more miles than in mid-April, but the total is still 30 percent to 40 percent lower than before the pandemic. Wilson said the next refund would be more precise and that Allstate is now distributing the initial payback, which represents 15 percent of monthly premiums in April and May.
Horace Mann, a provider of affordable insurance for educators, is giving customers a credit of 15 percent of two months of auto premiums, as well as a grace period through June on auto, property, supplemental and life insurance payments; enhancing coverages, including extending personal auto coverage to those delivering food, medicine, and other essential goods; and including Identity Fraud Advocacy Services with its Educator Advantage Program for all home, condo, and renters customers to protect against the increased risk due to increased online activity.
Erie Insurance is adding gift card and gift certificate reimbursement coverage to the company’s ErieSecure Home® policies, in response to the recent changes affecting businesses across the United States. The additional feature, included at no additional cost, would reimburse customers for remaining balances on eligible gift cards that no longer can be used at independently owned and operated local businesses due to business closures.
Foremost Insurance and Bristol West Insurance, members of the Farmers Insurance Group of Companies, announced they have contributed $500,000 to the Trusted Choice COVID-19 Relief Fund established by the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America, Inc. (IIABA – Big “I”). The Fund provides economic aid to independent insurance agencies, brokerages, and their owners and employees affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Horace Mann donated $100,000 to DonorsChoose “Keep Kids Learning” fund, an initiative to help teachers equip the most vulnerable students with educational materials at home. The company provides free online teaching resources, to help teachers adapt to remote learning, and it supports a number of foundations in its home state of Illinois.
Reach out to us in the Comments section and let us know what your company is doing to help ease the impact of COVID-19.
Since people are driving less in the midst of COVID-19 related stay-at-home orders, many auto insurers have responded with premium refunds totaling about $10 billion.
How are consumers reacting to these refunds? A May 5 webinar co-hosted by Cambridge Mobile Telematics’ (CMT) VP of Insurance & Government Affairs, Ryan McMahon, and J.D. Power’s VP of Insurance Intelligence, Kyle Schmitt, shed light on this question.
J.D. Power has been conducting consumer sentiment surveys since March 24. Schmitt said that one key takeaway is that in light of pandemic related layoffs, customers are thinking pragmatically about auto insurance, so the timing of the premium relief announcements was excellent. However, it’s important to note that auto insurance is not top of mind for many consumers struggling to keep the lights on or food on the table, and not everyone is aware of refunds.
Here are a few other key takeaways:
The panelists were also asked to speculate about possible increases in fraud, and McMahon said that fraud activity always comes with economic reductions, however it’s possible that fraudulent claims may be easier to spot because there are fewer claims.