In this AAIS Market Report, Merchants Insurance Group President, and New York Insurance Association (NYIA) Chair, Charles Makey, discusses issues and challenges facing the U.S. and New York insurance markets, including legislation, regulation, and much more.

The AAIS Pulse newsmagazine recently featured an in-depth discussion with Woody Bradford, CEO and Chair of Conning, one of the leading global investment management firms serving the insurance industry. He chatted with AAIS CEO Ed Kelly on the investment environment for insurance companies, inflation, cryptocurrency, investment strategies, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), and much more.

In July 2020, consulting firm McKinsey & Company put out a report detailing the talent transformation within the insurance industry. The topline message: Talent strategy is as important as business strategy.

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 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.

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.

After evaluating your organizational structure and asking essential questions about the need to establish a more remote workforce, it’s time to think about the big question… How are you going to effectively hire, attract, onboard and keep people in this remote environment? According to Sharon Emek, Ph.D., CIC, and founder and CEO of Work At Home Vintage Experts (WAHVE), once your hiring strategy and recruiting process is in place, you’ll want to turn to applicant selection, interviews, and onboarding.

The COVID-19 pandemic has left profound impacts on businesses worldwide, forcing many organizations to pivot to remote work. COVID-19 has taught companies that good, efficient work can be done from anywhere, and that talent identification shouldn’t be confined to geographic locations. As the pandemic continues, some organizations have struggled with how to hire and onboard top talent remotely.

For AAIS Associate Partner Work At Home Vintage Experts (WAHVE), filling the insurance talent gap is not just a goal…it’s a personal mission.

“Sharon Emek, Founder and CEO, and I both spent the major part of our careers in the insurance industry. We observed the decline in available talent as young people were not attracted to the insurance industry and recognized the quickly approaching baby-boomer retirement,” said WAHVE’s President and Chief Revenue Officer Bill Hunt. “We knew first-hand that attracting and retaining talent in the insurance industry, where specialized knowledge and experience is so important, was a problem and that the industry was facing a huge brain-drain with the imminent boomer retirement.”