Business News

NORCAL Mutual Insurance Company’s Pennsylvania-based wholly-owned subsidiary, PMSLIC Insurance Company, has been renamed NORCAL Specialty Insurance Company, pending additional regulatory approvals. NORCAL Specialty is the NORCAL Group’s surplus lines carrier.

The name change to NORCAL Specialty is part of a multi-year national expansion initiative to bring all subsidiaries under the NORCAL Group banner. NORCAL Specialty focuses on providing flexible coverage options that address the unique needs of complex accounts.

“Health care delivery is changing rapidly and the needs of medical practices are changing and more complex,” Ron Rumin, president of NORCAL Specialty said. “NORCAL Specialty is dedicated to crafting the right coverage solutions to meet these unique needs.”

PMSLIC Insurance Company, a member of the NORCAL Group of companies since 2002, has been transitioning its standard-line policyholders to NORCAL Mutual in 2015, and now writes non-admitted policies.

Guy Carpenter & Company, LLC, a global risk and reinsurance specialist and a wholly owned subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies, announced the formation of a strategic alliance with Symantec Corporation, a global leader in cybersecurity, to create a cyber aggregation model. The model will include a comprehensive catalogue of cyber scenarios from which insurers can derive frequency and severity distributions to measure the potential financial impact of loss from both affirmative cyber coverages and “silent” all-risk policies where cyber is the peril, but no cyber exclusions exist.

Guy Carpenter’s Cyber Solutions Specialty Practice, which focuses on the development and delivery of innovative cyber reinsurance solutions, will spearhead this effort. Symantec is a complementary new partner for Guy Carpenter.

Cyber attacks are estimated to cost businesses as much as $400 billion a year, and the systemic nature of the risk means (re)insurers can suffer losses from multiple insureds across vast geographies from a single event, exposing infrastructure, supply chain and other interconnected risks. In the wake of the cyber attack on the Ukrainian power grid in late 2015, (re)insurers are attempting to model, and assess the aggregation risk of, potential attacks on critical infrastructure, including electric grids, telecommunications networks, dams, transportation systems, chemical plants and civilian nuclear facilities. However, limited historical data and the constantly evolving threat make it a challenging peril to model.

The collaboration between Guy Carpenter and Symantec will leverage the advanced analytics, cyber security knowledge, and combined scale and innovation of both companies to accelerate the services needed to create an advanced cyber aggregation model.

TransUnion announced the launch of Quote Exchange, a dynamic insurance marketplace where carriers buy and sell real-time online quotes using enriched TransUnion data for precise segmentation and decisioning.
Quote Exchange is a marketplace for both carriers who are seeking new policyholders, and for those whom cannot provide policies for consumers, but would like to provide them with other options.

Early adopters of Quote Exchange have already been successful in using TransUnion data sets to get their quotes in front of consumers at the right time and at the right price.

Quote Exchange is different than other comparison platforms in that it offers carriers:

• Access to consumers with high purchase intent – Shoppers are engaged as they complete a quote directly on a carrier’s website.
• An enriched view of the consumer – TransUnion data assets (e.g. credit, fraud, violation data) are utilized by carriers to allow them a full view of the consumer prior to buying a lead and providing the consumer with a quote.
• Maximized ROI – Selling carriers can earn maximum value on contributed traffic because of transparency into enriched quotes. TransUnion data enables buying carriers to efficiently spend advertising dollars when consumers match their defined lead criteria.
• Insights through reporting – Market basket analysis allows carriers to gain insight into broad market statistics.

RMS, a global catastrophe risk management firm, has opened a new office in Tallahassee, Florida after the acquisition of HWIND Scientific in October 2015.

Florida is a key region for the hurricane risk industry, and Tallahassee is a pivotal location for state and local government agencies. The new Florida office gives RMS better access to the public sector and commercial partners, as well as research specialists and graduates at the state’s universities.

Founded in April 2014, HWIND provides real-time analysis for hurricanes, post-event windfield reconstruction footprints and an archive of historical wind products for hurricanes in the Western North Atlantic, Eastern Pacific and Central Pacific Ocean.

IBM announced that Security First Insurance, a Florida-based homeowners insurance company, joined forces with PointSource, a mobile design and development firm, and IBM Premier Business Partner, to deploy the IBM MobileFirst platform.

In an effort to enhance customer engagement, PointSource created a consistent user experience across all Security First platforms, including the new Security First Mobile app, resulting in a 195 percent increase in average monthly new users and a 140 percent increase in online payments.

The app’s Instant Quote, feature which generates an insurance quote in under three minutes, also contributed to a 35 percent increase in leads among Security First Insurance mobile users.

By leveraging location-based insights, PointSource created a unique feature for the Security First Insurance app with an interactive Storm Center. This enables all users to track the location of a storm with their location on a map and share personal updates with friends and family via social media.