Small Business Insurance Market Primed for Consolidation

November 18, 2014

  • November 18, 2014 at 12:44 pm
    Michael N. Escobar says:
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    There are so many regional insurers, though. And insurance regulation at the state level increases the costs for insurers to expand nationwide. So, even if the national insurance market has a low degree of consolidation, that doesn’t mean that an actual individual business somewhere has quite as much choice as this article makes out. How consolidated are the marketplaces at the state level? That’s what really matters.

  • November 18, 2014 at 3:47 pm
    Mike says:
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    As a broker, we hate small business. It’s very difficult to be profitable. Mainly it’s so difficult to make a profit because it’s so hard to get efficient service out of the carriers, and it’s so cumbersome to receive quotes out of multiple online systems. The underwriters and servicers on the carrier side are always lowest common denominator, or turnover is too rampant. The large P&C Carriers need to give up their pen to the brokers, or move to a system where they retain everything in house. The latter is unlikely because small business still likes to shop based on price. The Holy Grail is a system much like Progressive’s pricing system where the client puts in limited information and gets multiple prices – but it has to be automated because brokers don’t want to pay staff to input information into three carriers online platforms just to see numbers.

  • November 24, 2014 at 12:30 pm
    Paul says:
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    As usual, Conning is still stuck in the 1990s believing that always, big = better. This flies in the face of reality, particularly in small business insurance where you see the most keen competition among the regionals and super-regionals like Cincinnati, Acadia and Merchants to name a few, while the multi-nationals continue to struggle from an identity problem of who do they want to be. Technology is important only as much as agents favor the path of least resistance, but the tech issue has to be also coupled to consistent underwriting and sticking it out in niches for the long run, fair treatment and consistent pricing, and doing what’s necessary to alleviate anxiety that the carrier is going to wholesale non-renew a class of business or drop agencies because of their own failures in the marketplace.



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