Breakout Sessions: Property and Casualty (P & C)
George Lyle (Virginia Bureau of Insurance) and Marty Fisher (Martha Fisher & Associates) lead the P&C breakout sessions.
ICAE has a tradition of providing a positive platform through which consumer affairs professionals from companies, state DOIs and industry associations can candidly exchange views. The breakout sessions in particular are noted for the positive exchange of ideas from all viewpoints.
At this year’s Exchange, the initial breakout session was designed to be an issues-only timeslot. However, it evolved into an issue-identification and best-practices session with a smaller number of issues identified, but with a robust vetting and regulator response process. What was covered? Take a look:
Topic: Complaint uniformity and trending
Complaint uniformity general and more specifically, the impact on property and casualty companies, the reconciliation process with DOIs, and the need to completely understand how this information triggers audits and/or market conduct exams was determined to be the number one topic for discussion.
Because a number of regulators from four states were present in this breakout, the corporate representatives asked for candid regulator input. This resulted in a detailed conversation between regulators and companies where the group discussed:
- The soon-to-be rolled out NAIC standard definitions and coding
- The definition of a trend
- How companies can determine what will trigger market conduct exams
- The strong request for adequate tools for reconciliation processes
- The need for stronger outlets for consumer education on the topics of pricing and services
- The request from regulators to NOT use DOIs as the ultimate cause for price increases. As alternatives, they suggested price increases would be better handled by providing stronger education for producers so that producers could better understand pricing information and, therefore discuss this information with consumers.
Dick Allender (Illinois DOI) offers his views on credit-based insurance scores.
In the second P & C breakout session, trending concerns and reconciliation issues again surfaced for further discussion. The regulators were again open and candid, and replied with in-depth answers to corporate concerns. Following are discussion points from regulators and consumer affairs professionals:
- The group discussed reporting/tracking systems and how the information is used by both regulators and companies. Each group noted concerns with emerging and vanishing technology and expressed strong interest in sharing more about lessons learned with implementing reporting/tracking technology—without creating the appearance of product endorsement.The companies present discussed how trending data is disseminated within corporations to enhance the consumer experience.
- When queried about the increase in follow-up requests from DOIs, the regulators present suggested the reasons for more, and more extensive, follow-up requests are:
- More consumer-side push
- Challenges presented by the complexity of rating plans
- Speed of pricing changes
- Increase in numbers of terminations
- The group discussed communication preferences; regulators and companies present suggested a strong preference for all correspondence to be completed via email. Security and use of passwords was discussed in terms of protecting consumer data and convenience for all recipients.
