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Craig Robinson
Reinsurance Sales Engineer
StoneRiver
How did your year-end closing go? Work any weekends or overtime completing your statutory filings? Was schedule F or P a real bear this year?
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Anyone involved with regulatory financial reporting and accounting knows that changes within both are fairly common. However, the changes that are now being contemplated by the NAIC are beyond the “normal” changes we have all become accustomed to. So what are those possible changes, and why are they being considered?
Be sure to check out the new issue of NAIC Focus,
There will be a lot of other activity occurring throughout the year and the NAIC Focus is the place to bookmark for current information.
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Craig RobinsonWhen it comes to a reinsurance system, data consolidation is one of the most important benefits to be gained. Yes, expediting loss recoverables, automating schedule F and P preparation, and improving audit trails that point to exactly how your reinsurance entries were calculated are all very important, but having all your reinsurance data in one centralized repository is invaluable.
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Craig Robinson Reinsurance Sales Engineer StoneRiver |
 Don Goodenow Director, Product Management, Reinsurance & Collections Stone |
If you’re a reinsurer reading the insurance news, things might seem a bit bleak. Consider this from a recent Reuters article:
“* Reinsurance prices down 5-10 pct in Jan renewals-brokers
* Weak pricing power to remain a challenge in 2011
* Analysts see low single-digit decline
The world’s top three insurance brokers saw declines of 5-10 percent in the prices reinsurers were able to charge insurance companies for new risk contracts.”
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Frank Heaps
Director, P&C Product Marketing
StoneRiver
The recent news about the AIG agreement to resolve the underreporting of workers’ compensation premiums underlines the need to have proper administration and reporting solutions in place to fulfill state filings. The multi-state investigation looked at AIG’s filings from more than a decade ago (1975 – 2006). The penalty was $100M plus an additional $46.5M in taxes and assessments for misreporting over $2B in workers’ comp premiums in Pennsylvania.
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Frank Heaps
Director, P&C Product Marketing
StoneRiver
Remember all of the hype about the Internet back in the 1990’s: insurance carriers were all going to be virtual, agents were a dying breed, no more branches, etc. That was a far reach but we suddenly had a new way to interact with customers to conduct business. Our industry just had to figure out how that would work.
When the Internet first became a reality, it was uncharted territory. Technology was being developed just to be able to use this new communications tool. Browsers were raw, connections were slow, connectivity was unreliable, etc. There were no standards or guidelines for user interaction.
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Frank Heaps
Director, P&C Product Marketing
StoneRiver
Are you keeping up with your customers? Technology is changing rapidly; we all know that. We also understand that keeping up is a huge challenge. All this change is reshaping consumer expectations and they will quickly change their expectations of their insurance carriers. Youth generally drives technology change but older consumers are quickly embracing the ability to easily access and update information. All this inter-connectivity has been around for years, but the user interaction has become so simple and so seamless that basically anyone can do it. However, too many carriers are still processing insurance on systems that are 30 years old and cannot easily adapt to the new world.
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Frank Heaps
Director, P&C Product Marketing
StoneRiver
Recruiting is a tough proposition for most carriers. The average working age of an insurance professional is 56 and they plan to retire by 66. Within 14 years the approaching talent gap will severely impact our industry. Factor in the time to train people, attrition, and market dynamics, and we are looking at a chasm in our underwriters, adjusters, management, etc.
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Frank Heaps
Director, P&C Product Marketing
StoneRiver
That is a great question. Each year we see a new report from analysts and industry media that laments the aging work force of insurance and insurance IT professionals. When you couple the aging workforce issue with carriers that are downsizing or not replacing staff that leave, this is a real and a serious business problem. We know that the market will turn at some point, and indications are it could happen within the next 12 to 18 months. Will you be ready? How long does it take you to train an underwriter? An adjuster? A CSR?
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Don Goodenow
Director, Product Management, Reinsurance & Collections
StoneRiver
You know BOB. Sure you do. BOB’s been around for a long time, and I’m sure you’ve seen BOB, or a BOB look-alike a number of times. Everyone knows BOB - Best Of Breed.
BOB’s been the object of everyone’s desire: the absolute best processing component that you could ever want. Powerful and feature-rich, good old BOB was the best at his specific task. He’s been sought-after for as long as I can remember.
But BOB hasn’t had it easy. BOB didn’t always work well with others, and this has become a big problem. Being compared to that other ideal, the fully integrated suite, took its toll. In today’s world, being BOB just isn’t good enough. But neither is just being an integrated suite.