The AAIS Pulse newsmagazine recently featured Robert Hartwig, Ph.D., CPCU, industry expert and insurance professor at University of South Carolina's Moore School of Business. He spoke with AAIS CEO Ed Kelly on a range of topics facing the industry including COVID-19, climate change, cyber risk, year-end financials, and much more.

In August, AAIS Views detailed the results of our hugely successful Proof of Concept (POC) for openIDL (Open Insurance Data Link) that proved the blockchain technology can dramatically improve the insurance regulatory reporting proves for insurers and regulators. We also saw that insurer information could be correlated with data from other sources to reveal deeper insights, and that data could be leveraged by regulators, while remaining private, secure and in full control of participating carriers

openIDL, the groundbreaking blockchain technology AAIS developed to streamline regulatory reporting and connect data across the insurance industry has a chance to revolutionize the entire insurance ecosystem. When you peek behind the curtain, you see just how much went into building out this platform collaboratively with stakeholders in the insurance and technology world.

Risk Management Service Inc. (RMS) estimates $25 billion to $35 billion in onshore and offshore insured losses in the Gulf of Mexico alone were caused by Hurricane Ida. This doesn’t include the damage to other parts of the country. While the fundamentals of hurricanes are widely understood these days, there remain several important nuances to hurricane losses that are essential to understand for insurers, regulators, and the general public alike. Here we will look at one less understood type of claim from hurricanes – slab claims.

This is the next installment in a series of conversations with AAIS leadership to get to know them, their background, and the unique work they’re doing within AAIS to further the insurance industry. In this edition, AAIS Views spoke with Michael Payne, Chief Pricing Actuary, about his career, being creative as an actuary, the role data is playing to create better pricing models, and how AAIS is leveraging those models to deliver value to our Members.

Tell us about your background.

Michael Payne: When I was in college, I liked math, but really didn’t know what I wanted to do. Then I heard about Actuarial Science from an alum who came back to campus and gave a presentation about the career path. That’s what sparked my interest. I got an internship at Zurich and that turned into my first job out of school. I started out doing pricing at Zurich, went to SCOR Re to do reinsurance pricing, and went back to Zurich to eventually lead a pricing tools team.

One not-so-traditional role in my career was a stint I did at Sears in their Home Services unit where I was the Director of Underwriting Analysis. Basically, if you bought a refrigerator at Sears, they were going to offer you a protection plan. It was my role to figure out the prices for those protection agreements based on how likely the appliance was going to need to be repaired or even replaced.

Overall, I really like pricing. It’s prospective in nature as you try to determine what might happen in the future.

In the winter of 2018, I joined AAIS where I’ve been able to leverage my pricing experience. My role includes product development and delivering loss costs that are appropriate for the coverage being offered. Not all carriers have a large team of actuaries or loads of data, so our rating plans offer them a faster speed to market for a new line of business, or even insurtechs to get their first policies written.

In this edition of CEO Angles, AAIS President and CEO Ed Kelly speaks with Keith Wolfe, President of US Property & Casualty at Swiss Re and an AAIS board member, about lessons learned during the pandemic, the increasing value of data, the need to start looking at climate change, the troubling cyber risk trend, and the hot topic of social inflation.

On Aug. 16, at the 2021 Summer National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) National Meeting, AAIS VP of Government Affairs, Legal & Compliance, Robin Westcott, presented the results of a Proof of Concept (POC) testing whether openIDL could support a COVID-19 Business Interruption Data call issued by the NAIC.

The meeting served as the kickoff for the openIDL Regulatory Reporting Steering Committee (RRSC). Ms. Westcott provided highlights from the positive findings set out in the report published by AAIS declaring that blockchain/distributed ledger technology had passed the test enroute to even broader applications across the industry.

Following is a summary of Ms. Westcott’s presentation:

In the latest edition of CEO Angles, AAIS President and CEO Ed Kelly is joined by recently named President and CEO of the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies (NAMIC), Neil Alldredge, to talk about a variety of topics including the latest on business interruption insurance, social inflation, flood insurance and future growth opportunities for NAMIC and its member companies.

AAIS conducted a Proof of Concept (POC) using the open Insurance Data Link (openIDL) for regulatory reporting. The results demonstrated that this blockchain/distributed ledger technology can dramatically improve both the output and process of insurance regulatory reporting for insurers and regulators.

Blockchain started as a popular buzzword among techies but has since permeated across industries. In insurance, its potential is being realized as game changing. Truman Esmond, AAIS Vice President of Membership and Solutions, spoke at a recent webinar hosted by The Institutes Griffith Insurance Education Foundation on how AAIS is utilizing blockchain to support industry.