This session will provide an overall economic outlook of the property/casualty insurance industry. This session will include a high-level look at industry trends and disrupters. The always-popular Robert Hartwig, Ph.D., will provide important insights that will help you manage your company's risk.

Robert Hartwig, Ph.D.

Director, Center for Risk & Uncertainty Management
University of South Carolina

Risks change continuously, which can make it difficult to keep up. So while you can’t know everything, having a good understanding of what you do know is important to managing risk. During this session, the speakers will discuss several examples of risk assessment. They will also discuss geospatial mapping and how it can be used to understand proximity risks that can’t be understood from a spreadsheet. This will naturally flow into using geospatial science to understand risk aggregation in the event of catastrophes and how insurers can manage these risks.

Providing flood coverage is becoming more important every year, as we see more floods and the effects of climate change affecting communities. Yet, fewer than 4 percent of American homeowners are insured against flooding. Because of this, the property/casualty insurance industry has seen large negative impacts for consumers and carriers. There is a lot of opportunity for mutual insurers to protect their clients and provide needed coverage to this rising risk. This session will discuss the current and future state of flood risk in America along with the consumer demand to purchase flood policies.

Cyber and privacy issues continue to impact insurers of all lines. Because of increased use of biometric information, states’ continued adoption of the NAIC model act and states’ increasing enactment of consumer privacy protections, all NAMIC members should be considering the impact and trends as purchasers and providers of cyber and privacy solutions.

The world is in a constant state of flux. With increasing environmental, societal, and technological risks intersecting to disrupt people and businesses, an agile, digitally enabled business has never been more critical. Join this session to learn more about the importance of tech-enabled underwriting to help maintain pace with our ever-changing world and to understand, manage, and adjust for the future of risk.

Having heavy vegetation growing right next to a home can nearly double the chance of its destruction in a wildfire, according to a joint study from ZestyAI and the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. This means that homeowners in high wildfire risk areas who remove fuel from around their homes significantly reduce their chances of property destruction. This session will discuss the importance of mitigation efforts and how modern wildfire risk models not only take those efforts into account but help homeowners tailor their efforts to what will have the most value. It will also touch on changes to the regulatory environment, including some states requiring discounts for wildfire mitigation.

Underwriters need a wealth of relevant, accurate data to assess and underwrite properties. Yet, gathering relevant data can be timely and costly. During this session, attendees will look at the third-party data services available to insurers and how insurers are using the data to make better underwriting decisions.

Many catastrophic weather events, such as hurricanes, wildfires, and windstorms, are increasing in frequency and severity. How can insurance companies prepare for these events, respond faster and more efficiently, and ultimately help customers recover from tragedy quickly? This session will discuss how using computer vision, predictive data modeling, and integrated partner data can proactively improve loss ratios, provide post-CAT damage assessment, and provide better customer service to policyholders.

When analyzing geographical risk for auto rating, the focus is primarily on company experience, which can lack credibility and be slow to react to changing conditions. To address this, companies typically incorporate a complement of credibility, such as data from a statistical organization or competitors. Even though this helps address the credibility issue, it still suffers from only providing a limited view of the complete geographical picture and remains slow to respond to changing conditions. This session will describe how the use of accident report data combined with detailed road segment usage data can address these limitations.

Automation and analytics have been transforming insurance underwriting delivering higher levels of productivity and customer satisfaction. This session describes the current and future state of underwriting automation.