A Fast-Moving Auto Industry Presents Challenges and Opportunities

The automotive industry transformation continues to have significant repercussions in the insurance industry. With improving sophistication in car technology, telematics, and consumer behaviors, insurance carriers face new and unprecedented challenges spanning the entire lifecycle of the policy from research to claims. Still, personal and commercial auto insurance remain the industry bellwether as the largest product lines accounting for more than $300 billion in annual premiums.

A distributed workforce, also known as telecommuting or remote work, occurs when a business has employees that work in different locations (e.g., their home, satellite offices, etc.). This is an idea that AAIS has embraced successfully for nine years before the COVID-19 pandemic. The long-held belief that collaboration can only happen in person in a single location is no longer the case.

The AAIS Pulse newsmagazine recently featured a discussion with experts from Munich Re, Berkley Re Solutions, and AAIS hosted by AAIS Vice President of Products John Kadous on the emerging risks affecting policyholders in the homeowners market. The focus was on the evolving threats around cyber, fire and flood and how they’re being impacted by climate change, technology and more.

The AAIS Pulse newsmagazine recently featured a discussion between Maryland Insurance Commissioner Kathleen Birrane and AAIS VP of Government, Legal and Compliance Robin Westcott. They covered a range of topics, from careers in insurance and climate change to National Association of Insurance Commissioner Working Groups, technology, insurtechs and much more.

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.

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: