The 2018 news cycle was flooded with disturbing images of roaring fires in California. These wildfires were cataclysmic in scale and severity. Even more concerning is that the 2018 severe wildfire season was preceded by an awful 2017 season, which was the worst in recorded history until it was outdone by 2018. These events are troublesome and seem to be increasing in frequency. How can we in the risk management industry account for these seemingly worsening risks?

The Delaware Captive Insurance Association (DCIA) held its Spring Forum May 7-8 at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware. Captive service providers, captive owners and Delaware’s captive regulators gathered in attendance for sessions covering a range of relevant topics. The conference carried regulation as its unofficial theme, perhaps not unexpectedly, with each session analyzing a different aspect or angle. The impact of politics on captive regulatory decisions, the legal hurdles of insuring the key players of the cannabis industry, and the various state-specific treatments of self-procurement tax were a few of the topics covered.

Today, insurance is more competitive and more accurately priced because of better data, computing power, customization and emerging technology. Lytx (formerly DriveCam) records 30 seconds before and after a crash. These recordings can be used to prove innocence or guilt in most cases, saving insurance companies millions in litigation costs. The insurtech boom caught many insurance companies off guard. When they did not adapt quickly enough, they lost a significant portion of their competitive position. New approaches to claims adjusting, premium pricing and underwriting will continue to arise. The best chance insurance companies have to remain relevant is to develop unique technologies and rating variables to outprice the competition.

In what has started to become a fairly regular occurrence, new proposals for reform of the current Michigan No-Fault automobile insurance system (also known as Personal Injury Protection or PIP for short) have once again surfaced in the state legislature. Just in the last few weeks, both the Michigan State Senate and State House advanced bills that contained many potentially significant changes to the way injuries occurring from automobile accidents are handled by insurance. 

In the spring of 2019 we attended our first industry event: the Casualty Actuarial Society’s (CAS) Ratemaking, Product and Modeling (RPM) Seminar. RPM serves as a networking event and provides continuing education for CAS members by way of numerous workshops and sessions. We both work on predictive analytics projects, which made this event relevant to our work and solidified our understanding on many of the topics we work on every day, including modeling methods, model testing and implementation.