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.

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.

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.

The collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo in Surfside, Florida, shocked the nation, starting a much-needed conversation about the importance of risk mitigation. As the events unfolded, we learned that the information about the significant risk of collapse was known—to some—but simply went unheeded. 

While the U.S. economy slowly returns to normal following the COVID-19 pandemic, the insurance industry continues to grapple with business interruption claims, court battles and the future of pandemic-related insurance. In Part II of our two-part Advisory Report, Nicole Milos, Assistant Counsel at AAIS, explains the systemic risk global pandemics pose to the insurance industry and how we’re leveraging data gathered during the pandemic to meet customer demand for future pandemic-type coverage.

Flood insurance has long been primarily administered by the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which has 5.1 million policies in force. But the landscape for flood insurance – and who needs it – is changing. This was the topic of an AM Best webinar that included Linda Jancik, AAIS Personal Lines Product Manager, Serena Garrahan, Vice President, Inland Flood Product Manager at Munich Re US, and Rob Olson, Senior Research Analyst at International Risk Management Institute (IRMI).

While the U.S. economy slowly returns to normal following the COVID-19 pandemic, the insurance industry continues to grapple with business interruption claims, court battles and the future of pandemic-related insurance. In Part I of a two-part Advisory Report, Nicole Milos, Assistant Counsel at AAIS, explains why BI policies were never meant to cover losses from pandemics.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic struck more than a year ago, travel restrictions and remote work and schooling kept people close to home. With far fewer places to go, there were less people and cars on the roads, which had numerous implications for the insurance industry.