Posted On: October 18, 2004, 3:16 pm CDT

Posted By: jsjag

To answer your question, no. The P&C industry will not change until it is forced to change. I still believe in State regulated insurance but agents, brokers and insured's are getting tired of the old business model. Look at the knee jerk hard market / soft market insurance cycle listen to the industry try to reason why. I especially like the one reason that stock market returns are pegged to hard markets. Ok, so what we are to believe is that standard book underwriting can't be leveled out to take stock market returns into consideration. Sorry, I don't buy it.

P&C companies are not the only insurance companies that loath to change. Life insurers are slow to change. Consider that each and every life insurance company has their own individual application all with their own hidden nuances. Why hasn't there been a push to standardize life insurance applications like P&C Accord forms? Computer fill-able PDF forms should be the normal standard application. For an industry not to try and stream line the application process shows the lack of forward looking business models. Life insurance company specific software was years behind the curve to change from DOS programs to Windows based programs.