As the insurance industry continues to navigate the pace of change, complexity and uncertainty in our world, consumers continue to respond, expecting companies to be more responsive to their needs. This year’s underwriting predictions offer guidance on how carriers can respond faster.

1.  Evolving cognitive technologies will help insurers capture opportunity from more discrete market segments

Technological advances in AI and data analytics are helping insurers further refine market segments. As these more discrete segments grow, so too does the opportunity for insurers to address them with new products and services offered through a wider range of digital distribution channels. One such channel is embedded insurance—placing insurance in the customer journeys of non-insurance companies—for example, offering life insurance during the process of applying for a mortgage.

New cognitive insurance platforms underpin these new products and distribution channels providing life carriers with a way to capture that opportunity, and as

This post is part of a series sponsored by AgentSync.

Happy New Year! You’ve enjoyed the end of the holiday season glut. Now you’re looking for ways to tighten up those processes, and what better way to start your year off right than with compliance resolutions?

Sure, 99 percent of resolutions fail (or some other made up statistic, probably). But with AgentSync’s help, these are simple to keep, and they’re worth the effort!

It’s time. Strike a new pose, turn over a leaf, and buckle up, because here are the best compliance resolutions for the coming year for those of us tasked with maintaining producer licenses or appointments.

Without further ado:

1. We will not pit compliance against recruitment and sales

Silos! Silos everywhere! Data silos are turning your compliance and recruitment or sales teams into a modern day Capulet vs. Montague face off. You know how it goes. A

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX)—named for its chief sponsors, former Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D–Md.) and former Rep. Mike Oxley (R–Ohio)—was intended to restore trust in the transparency of publicly traded companies after the collapses of WorldCom and Enron Corp. revealed that their auditors had certified financial reports that overstated the firms’ assets and massively understated their liabilities.

But, of course, “transparency” isn’t quite the same thing as prudential safety and soundness. In the insurance space, more specifically, transparency doesn’t necessarily equal solvency.

A new paper from Martin Grace of Temple University and Juan Zhang at Eastern Kentucky University looks at how property and liability insurers have responded to the enhanced disclosure and attestation requirements, both of SOX itself and of new auditing rules subsequently adopted by state insurance regulators. The latter were closely modeled on SOX, but also applied to nonpublic insurers, primarily mutuals.

They reach a counterintuitive conclusion:

This post is part of a series sponsored by AgentSync.

The evolution of technology in any industry follows a similar pattern. Transformation doesn’t happen overnight. Rather, we see a progression from infancy to maturity in the way an industry uses the tech at its disposal. At the same time, the actual capabilities of technology keep progressing so that what was “cutting edge” one day soon becomes standard, and there’s room for the next innovation to take its spot as the latest and greatest.

According to AgentSync’s Co-Founder and CEO Niji Sabharwal, the insurance industry is at an inflection point. As the major players in the industry have reached a moderate, baseline level of digitization (expedited by the necessity of a more distributed, remote workforce thanks to COVID-19), the next wave of insurance technology (insurtech) can begin to take hold. We’ve seen this progression happen more quickly in other

As the calendar flips to 2023, among the scores of new laws taking effect are a pair of legislative mandates that would, for the first time anywhere in the country, require firearms owners to obtain and maintain liability insurance. What remains to be seen, however, is whether either measure will survive Second Amendment challenges, particularly given the standard handed by the U.S. Supreme Court in its June 2022 New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen decision.

There are good reasons for skepticism in both cases, although one of the two—a municipal ordinance passed in San José, California in January 2022—has already cleared its first court challenge. The other mandate—an arguably more carelessly drafted statewide bill signed by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy just before Christmas—may raise insurance-law questions pertaining to coverage for intentional and criminal acts, even before it is subject to Second Amendment analysis.