E&S/Specialty

The second round of P&C earnings reports for the first quarter reveal differing strategies for the challenging workers' comp line, struggles for regionals and rising retention rates for many primary carriers. The last trend may suggest the market is bottoming, P&C Insurance Analyst William Wilt notes.

It may have seemed like horrible timing when Susan Rivera was starting up a program business-focused MGA in late 2009, but there were several advantages to launching in the wake of a global financial crisis and about six years into a soft property and casualty insurance market, she says.

In spite of competitive conditions in the specialty program business segment, an insurance industry analyst doesn't see any flashing red alerts signaling major troubles ahead for program carriers so far in 2011.

Traditional loss reserving methods that assume past loss development patterns will repeat produced initial loss estimate that were 25 percent too low for some years during the last soft market, say Guy Carpenter, arguing for the use of modern statistical approaches.

Jeremy Hitzig, CEO of Distinguished Programs and 2011 president of the Target Market Program Administrators Association, describes his firm's strategies for achieving growth and efficiency, as well as ongoing initiatives at TMPAA.

Insurers need to step-up their compliance knowledge of sanctions if they want to avoid a fate similar to HHC Insurance Holdings, which paid a fine of over $38,000 for insuring aircraft used in Iran.