Addressing the Challenges of Portfolio and Program Management

The insurance industry is heavily reliant on data, as was emphasised during the recent Program Manager Conference & Awards 2023. This event, held in May at the iconic Gotham Hall in Midtown Manhattan, gathered leading executives from the US program insurance sector.  

The conference facilitated in-depth discussions on several key themes, all underscoring the ongoing issues and opportunities within the sector, particularly in terms of portfolio and program management. 

One of the salient themes that emerged from the panel discussion was the sustained momentum and growth of the Managed General Agent (MGA) and program insurance space.  

This theme directly aligns with our mission at Verisk to enable more intelligent deployment of capital. While the sector has seen remarkable growth in the last decade, the sustainability of this growth was a point of interest among the C-suite panelists. With the right tools and insights provided by companies like Verisk, insurers can continue to propel this growth by making informed decisions. 

Evolving carrier-MGA relationships and the emergence of hybrid models were also prominent discussion points, highlighting the need for adaptable business strategies.  

The ability of insurers to aggregate and consolidate their data into one streamlined view is increasingly important in this evolving landscape. Consolidated data enables more effective exposure monitoring and bolsters the use of probabilistic models, catering to the growing complexity of carrier-MGA dynamics. 

Talent migration and the need for the next generation of professionals were discussed in depth at the conference as both an opportunity and a challenge within the sector.  

The ability to attract and retain top talent is seen as crucial to maintaining growth and competitiveness. Through facilitating better placement outcomes, Verisk’s tools can help attract talent by highlighting the dynamic and impactful nature of the work in the insurance program management sector. 

The panel also emphasised technology as an enabler, particularly in meeting demands through innovation and exploring emerging specialty niches.  

 

The Future of Insurance Tech at Verisk

Verisk's commitment to providing real-time data insights is in line with the themes explored at the Program Manager conference. By embracing technological advancements, insurers can drive growth in an increasingly competitive market, respond to emerging niches, and meet the evolving needs of their clients. 

One of our most recent initiatives has been the development of low-cost data capture solutions as part of the onboarding and document creation process.  

By leveraging our Sequel Hub and Rulebook Rating as a Service solutions, we aim to help binder brokers surface essential data from their coverholders' systems, making it easier for insurers, and capital providers, to access and analyse the data they need to make informed portfolio-based decisions, manage their premium income expectations, and their overall real time capital delivery - not 6 months after the fact…  

“At Verisk, we believe in surfacing data in an aggregated format to binder brokers, and ultimately to the capital providers, in a near real-time fashion. This enables coverholders to maintain certainty in a hardening market and display the maintenance of that consistency and certainty to their end insureds. The binder broker’s ability to better articulate the collection of binders they place across their various coverholder clients based on data insights, means that the terms, rating guide, and overall authority negotiated within each individual coverholder’s binder contract agreement benefits from the binder broker having leveraged the full weight of the premium they put into the market. This creates the opportunity to negotiate the binders as the sum of their total parts, rooted in data, rather than as individual parts/binders.  

Equally, but as a part of the above data surfacing differentiator, a binder broker has the ability to negotiate better terms and conditions in a hardening market when it comes to capital management. Given that the capital providers now have near real-time access to the data it allows them to plan around the highs and lows of a book and make better use of their capital in a world where that increasingly matters most to insurers.”  Reid Stanway, Chief Digital Officer. 

For coverholders who have access to digital rating models under their coverholder agreements and are separately generating their policy documents within a word-based solution, Verisk are exploring the concept of using their Whitespace platform in connection with the Sequel Hub to generate the policy wordings, but with the rating engine being called upon prior to bind. By inserting the premium into the wording, this again reduces frictional and operational costs for the coverholder in their daily processes. We believe that our ongoing investment in internal tech development will allow us to continue delivering cutting-edge solutions that address the unique needs of our clients, both in terms of geography and the specific challenges they face. 

By harnessing the power of technology, we aim to revolutionise the insurance industry, providing our clients with the tools and insights they need to succeed in an increasingly competitive market. The future is about data; our solutions are about surfacing that data in a manner that benefits existing market practitioners whilst supporting coverholders in delivering best in class insurance solutions to their end customers. In a time when capital is increasingly scarce and risk is systemically increasing, both in frequency and severity of loss, all these strategic data solutions are fast becoming the differentiators for program managers.

To know more reach out to

Lucy Card, Head of Client Engagement - Digital Distribution: lucy.card@verisk.com

Reid Stanway, Chief Digital Officer: reid.stanway@verisk.com