What's Your Agency Worth?: Kate Kinkade began selling life insurance in 1977 and built an agency that had about 100 employees in 2005. She had started in retail, but her agency, Time ...
What's Your Agency Worth?: Experts' Advice on Selling Your Agency: You've built an agency over decades of work. Now the time has come to sell it. Here are some bits of advice from Kate Kinkade, president and founder of Time ...
2008 U.S. Group Life Issued Falls, But AAA Life Group Drives Ahead : While the overall U.S. life/health industry saw a 3% decline in group life business issued in 2008, three companies saw big increases, including one standout ...
Back to Basics: Is this a time of austerity for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners? As the NAIC prepares its 2010 budget, organization officials are vowing ...
Committees With Insurance Interests: The business of Congress and the business of the insurance industry are as entangled as they've ever been. But the goals of Capitol Hill and of the industry ...
Defense Department: "How low can it go?" In most circles, this question would be about the stock market, housing values or interest rates. But for those in the medical ...
Getting Ready: Ready or not, migration to the new ICD-10 code set is coming and many health plans have their work cut out for them to gear up for the federal government's ...
Getting Ready: Sticker Shock: How costly is the 5010/ICD-10 undertaking? "It depends on the size of the entity and how many systems and processes need to be changed," said Adam Birnbaum, ...
Going Their Own Way: A Native American tribe domiciling and regulating its own captive insurance company isn't a new proposition for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. Five ...
Going Their Own Way: A Gray Area in Tribal Jurisdiction: When Nathan Bradley became the administrative services director for Oklahoma's Kaw Nation in early 2009, it didn't take him long to land between a rock and a ...
Heading for Home: Nearly three-quarters of a million Americans are taking out their passports to seek medical care abroad. International medical tourism, estimated to become a ...
Heading for Home: Going Abroad: Companion Global Healthcare Inc., a subsidiary of BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina, has been an industry leader. It works with agents, employers, ...
Insight: Don't Take Risks, Make No Progress: A risk professional was asked to evaluate the risk tolerance of a company. "You need to increase your risk-taking by 100%," the risk professional said to the ...
Insight: Finding the Upside Now Pays Off Later: Today's economic environment may be taking a toll on independent insurance agencies, but it also presents a unique opportunity. With more high-quality ...
Insight: New Options Arise From Competition: This time of year, many group insurance underwriters experience an overwhelming number of proposals as they quote on Jan. 1 renewals for 2010. Typically, ...
Insight: Progressively Smarter: To paraphrase a recent insurance advertisement, the future comes at us fast and impacts us in unexpected ways. The challenge for insurance industry ...
Insight: Reassuring Clients That All Is Not Lost : Even though the economy may well remain wobbly for some time, it seems to be getting its sea legs. Although some may have differing positions, 90% of ...
Insight: The Buck Finds Its Way to Insurers : A placard that sat on the desk of President Harry S. Truman said "The Buck Stops Here." But that sign also could sensibly sit on the desk of many insurance ...
Insight: What's Your Plan?: Infrastructure provides the backbone for commerce to occur in an unrestricted and potentially profitable manner. Should a component of a country's ...
Last Word: By the Book: Unlike some of its more flamboyant peers--those with ducks, reptiles and 800-pound gorillas as their spokes-animals--the Chubb Group of Insurance Cos. tends ...
Life Guards: At a time when employees kick in a greater share for workplace health care plans and employers reduce or eliminate matching contributions to retirement ...
Life Guards: Guardian Life Insurance Co. of America: Call Center Help: Guardian's WillPrep Services give plan members access to online planning documents and professional assistance with issues related to trusts, wills, ...
Life Guards: Hartford's 'Conversation' With Customers: Funeral benefits are part of the "Life Conversations from The Hartford" package. Plan members may also go online to create a legally binding will or explore ...
Life Guards: ING USA Life Group: Predicting Proactive Planning: ING contracted last year with nationwide funeral planning and concierge service Everest and introduced funeral planning benefits on group products on Jan. 1. ...
Life Guards: In a Tough Economy, Group Plans Step Up: It's a sign of the times: layoffs, early retirements and tough decisions about all things financial. In response, ING's U.S. Retirement Services launched a ...
Life Guards: MetLife: 'Nice Value-Added Service': MetLife began offering will-preparation services as a standard feature on supplemental term and group life plans in 2000. The services are provided by Hyatt ...
Looking for the Next Hard Market : Marla Donovan Burns and Wilcox Burns and Wilcox is a wholesale member of NAPSLO and is a North American-based wholesaler with offices in 38 cities and ...
Mastering Disaster: TrueNorth officials hadn't anticipated being in the targeted flood area, but the Cedar River had another plan. As the river began cresting toward historic ...
Open Door Policy: Brazil's reinsurance market is growing like one of the country's rain forests as it evolves after years of state monopoly. "Brazil has a very large ...
Quality Counts: Companies rely on catastrophe models to provide reliable estimates of loss, whether to manage risks over the long term or to understand their loss potential ...
Quality Counts: Building Numbers: In addition to challenges collecting reliable property-specific building characteristics, the seemingly simple task of building identification can complicate ...
Quality Counts: Replacement Values: The Backbone of Modeling: Loss estimates in catastrophe models are tied directly to the building's replacement value. If a replacement value is too low, the loss estimates will be too ...
Quality Counts: The Importance of Building-Level Geocodes: Location should be geocoded--that is, tagged with a latitude and longitude--at the exact building location. Ideally, this will be a rooftop-level geocode, or ...
Quality Counts: Why Property-Specific Detail Is Essential: To assess the potential magnitude of using unknown property characteristics in risk modeling, AIR analyzed the possible difference in average annual loss for ...
Rankings of Five Largest Reinsurers Remain Unchanged in 2008 List of Top 35 Global Firms: The five largest reinsurance groups remained unchanged as ranked by 2008 gross premiums written, accounting for nearly 58% of the top 35's total. This ...
Running the Numbers: Growing an independent insurance-adjusting business is a matter of persevering, upgrading, training and learning, a panel of insurance-adjusting experts told ...
Space Program: Despite having completed a data center upgrade in 2004, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. was still dogged by server sprawl. "We predicted that we were going ...
Space Program: Eggs in One Basket: An underlying concern of virtualization is that concentrating an abundance of files and applications within a confined server space creates vulnerability. A ...
