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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

During the height of the COVID pandemic, Berkley Re Solutions’ Jeff Cron joined AAIS for a an AAIS Pulse session looking at ‘Cyber Crime: The Online Home Invasion.’   "We’re all online more, seeing content, and clicking links to different articles, videos, and other forms of media. While the actual risk hasn’t changed, volume has magnified, with more scams and more screen time.”

The burgeoning cannabis market is creating pressure on the insurance industry to develop products that address risks emerging from increased legalization. AAIS Commercial Lines Product Manager Joe Jonas shared his insights on the market during the 2021 Business Insurance Cannabis Update. Mr. Jonas was joined by Charles Pyfrom, CMO at CannGen Insurance, and host Gerrit Nagarwalla, CPCU from Canopius, for a discussion on ‘Claims, Policy & Underwriting.’

In this edition from the AAIS Webinar Series, titled: The Value of Risk Control: Moving Beyond the Basics, Bryon Snethen, Vice President Risk Improvement at EMC Insurance and Jacob Pereira, a Solutions Engineer at Risk Control Technologies identified the purpose and value of risk control to a variety of stakeholders, including agents, insurance companies, policyholders, and society.

In an AAIS Webinar, FLAMES: The Modern Fire Protection Evaluation Model, AAIS Vice President Phil LeGrone, and AAIS Senior Risk Strategy Lead Matt Hinds-Aldrich, PhD, outlined the new fire model, FLAMES, and the advantages it offers over traditional models for underwriters assessing and managing non-cat fire risk.

Imagine this: You’re working from home, like many others during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your children are also home, remote learning. One of your kids falls prey to malware, infecting your entire network with a virus. Your at-home business’s website is shut down for eight hours. You sigh a breath of relief, thankful that your insurance will cover the costs… or does it?