Welcome to iLeads Insurance Market Minute, where we bring you the latest, most relevant news regarding the insurance market. Last week you were reading Premium Renewal Rates Rise Across Major Commercial Lines: Ivans. This week we’re bringing you:Professional Liability Market Is “a Game of Whack-a-Mole Now”
Alera predicts 2021 rate increases across several commercial lines*
Alera Group Inc. forecasts rate increases across several lines of commercial insurance in its Property & Casualty 2021 Market Outlook released Wednesday.
The broker said that in addition to broadly higher rates, “insurance buyers can expect to see increases in coverage exclusions along with higher retentions and deductibles.” In addition, renewals will likely take longer as insurers ask more questions and require additional data.
Among major lines, property coverage rates are forecast to rise by 13.6% in 2021. Underwriters will prefer risks seen as having lower than average catastrophe exposure while those seen as “higher risk” should expect larger than average price increases as well as lower limits, Alera said.
General liability is projected to rise 11.3% for “virtually all businesses,” Alera said. Tighter underwriting standards are likely and some classes of business, including contractors, municipalities, public utilities, manufacturers of “difficult products,” chemicals, and habitational real estate, may be offered less capacity.
Axis Insurance adds four senior E&S underwriters*
Axis Insurance, the specialty insurance business of Axis Capital Holdings Ltd., said Wednesday it has named four senior underwriters to its U.S. excess and surplus property team.
Cary Prewitt was named vice president and joins Axis from Liberty International Underwriters, where he was a vice president for excess and surplus, Axis said in a statement.
Quinn McAleenan was named vice president and joins Axis from Ironshore Insurance, where he was an excess and surplus property underwriter.
Bryan Paterson was named vice president. He was most recently an account executive officer in the large property unit at Travelers Insurance.
Professional liability market is “a game of whack-a-mole now”*
It’s no news flash that the professional liability market has faced several challenges this year as the hardening marketplace and coronavirus pandemic have converged, bringing substantial increases to financial and professional lines rates over the course of 2020 – but what does the professional lines reinsurance landscape look like at the moment?
During a panel titled, “State of the Market: Financial Lines and Professional Liability Reinsurance,” at the 2020 PLUS Virtual Conference, experts currently working within the treaty reinsurance space who are focused on large diverse portfolios spoke about reinsurers’ views of the professional lines business. The first point made by one panelist was that he wouldn’t call this a hard market.
“I know there’s a lot of dialogue around this, that this is a hard market – it is a transitionary market,” said Brian Finlay, who heads up North American management and professional treaty liability at Trans Re. “I think there’s a lot of pricing corruption that’s gone on for the past 10 years … [but] the rate is coming back into the market and I’m saying that this is not a hard market. A hard market is where you cannot get something done, [and right now] there is capacity out there – there’s reinsurance capacity, there is insurance capacity.”
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