The Risks of Hazard

This week I attended the PCI National Flood Conference in Washington, DC (in Arlington, VA for geographic sticklers like me). Over the weekend, as everyone converged on the city, the sun was shining and the Potomac was sparkling as it flowed gently between its protected banks into Chesapeake Bay. It was a welcoming setting, especially for the delegation coming over from London – a significant number of underwriters and brokers from Lloyd’s.

With the published agenda occupied by 90 percent NFIP material meant to cover assorted minutiae of the program, what might these underwriters be doing there? Private flood is what they were doing there. The remaining 10 percent of the agenda addressed private flood topics, but it was the corridor talk that was predominantly about private flood.

Last week, Property and Casualty 360 published a post by Sean Allen entitled 4 areas for the Insurance Industry to Modernize. The article is based on the consensus after the Xchanging London Market Conference last November, and it starts with:

Fair or not, many look at insurance as an outdated industry, lagging behind others of similar stature and scale when it comes to innovation.

One of the things venture capitalists are good at — when they are not funding and driving innovation — is blogging. Those VC guys really like a good blog, and VC blogs are a good place to read about insurance, as the combination of fresh thinking on stale technology is hard to resist.

Hacker Daily is one such blog worth checking out. It talks about any and all industries from an innovative and entrepreneurial perspective, including (from time to time) insurance. Last month, Josh Nussbaum wrote a post about the art of predicting how successful a successful investment might be. One of the industries he used for his study was insurance (along with healthcare, and a bunch of other stuff), and it’s worth a look at what he had to say about it.

As I have studied underwriting natural catastrophe, one of the more interesting things I’ve learned is that it’s widely done with software built for something else: accumulation. Even though many accumulation solutions (including some cat models) offer an underwriting function, it is not suited to the actual task of underwriting.

With 2015 now firmly in the past, I am seeing a lot of blogs with 2015 Top 5 lists. As with all good ideas, it needs to be copied assimilated. Today, I am counting down the Top 5 articles from last year based on viewership.

Without any ado at all, here are the Top 5 Risks of Hazard episodes from 2015:

5. Is Disruption Really Coming to Insurance? In October I attended a conference in San Francisco exploring how insurance was about to be disrupted. I wrote this post afterwards, being unconvinced. Meanwhile, a nice debate about it has popped up at ITL, here and here.