Business News: Safety National, Starr Companies, Paradigm Outcomes, Willis Towers Watson

Safety National has entered the cyber risk insurance marketplace with a portfolio of coverage to assist companies in addressing global network security and privacy breach incidents.

Safety National’s cyber risk insurance assists clients in effective incident response and protects the balance sheet from cyber security risks. Coverage options range from liability, business interruption, reputational harm, regulatory defense, penalties, data restoration and extortion. Policyholders will also gain access to a network of expert vendors to assist with cyber risk preparedness and breach response.

Spencer Timmel, CIPP/US, CIPM, national Director of Cyber and Technology Insurance, joined Safety National in March 2017 to lead the company’s emergence as a provider of cyber liability and other related coverages. He has nearly 20 years in the industry and a decade of cyber-related experience.

Starr Companies recently announced commercial auto coverage for aviation insureds.

Auto coverage is available on an ‘any auto’ basis for fleets owned by companies operating in the aviation industry when purchased along with other insurance coverages. Aviation operations include, but are not limited to: fixed base operators, MRO shops, aircraft operators – fixed and rotor wing fleets, airports and flight schools.

The insurer recently announced an agreement with Jet Support Services, Inc. (JSSI) to offer maintenance service programs to aviation insureds.

In a separate press release, Starr announced commercial auto coverage is now being offered in all provinces and territories in Canada.

Paradigm announced a definitive agreement to purchase ForeSight Medical last month. That purchase closed on October 12.

ForeSight’s suite of surgical management solutions combined with Paradigm’s expertise in complex and catastrophic injuries will form a comprehensive resource available for high-cost, high-acuity and complex care management for the workers’ compensation marketplace and beyond. Last year, Paradigm acquired two case management companies, The ALARIS Group and Encore Unlimited.

Global advisory, broking and solutions firm Willis Towers Watson released an updated version of its Emblem predictive modeling software. Emblem 4.6 is distinguished by the addition of a technique to model complex customer behaviors involving multiple possible outcomes, in order to understand real-world dynamics more accurately and visualize risk more easily.

Emblem is used in both commercial and personal lines to build predictive models that support a broad range of applications, including pricing premiums, more effectively. The latest version also performs 20 percent faster than the previous version on rich data sets, enabling significantly reduced decision cycle times.

The updated software, which allows insurers to fit models to vast data sets in seconds, builds on the last major release in 2016 by introducing multinomial modeling, which has the ability to more accurately model behaviors with multiple outcomes. This enables users to detect previously unnoticed patterns in insurance claims and customer behavior experience within a single fast and robust modeling framework.

A multinomial model predicts the probabilities of a set of related events, and therefore also the probability none of those events occur. Multinomial modeling has the ability to model complex customer behaviors with multiple outcomes. In certain circumstances, it provides a more accurate representation of modeling outputs.

Examples of multinomial modeling uses include:

• Multi-brand new business demand
• Multi-product demand offering
• Add-on package purchasing
• Loan survival and delinquency
• Claims tiering