Specialty Insurance Blog

College Lectures Online

Did you know there are numerous online sources for college lectures (although not necessarily for our favorite subject, insurance)? Andy Kessler has a short summary of this recent trend (see here). One of the problems with online lectures is finding what you want. Two obvious sources are YouTube and Apple’s iTunes, where you can find AppleU. There are a number of useful articles and blogs that have provided sources beyond Andy Kessler. While many sources are trying to sell online courses, mostly for credit, Andy points out that some great lectures are available free of charge. US News & World Report ran a recent article on Massachusetts Institute of Technology Prof. Walter Lewin (see here), who has numerous lectures on... Read more →

Federal Employee Insurance Niche

One example of a specialty insurance agent executing a niche oriented strategy is a company specializing in writing insurance coverages, including professional liability insurance, for current and former federal employees. Wright & Company provides supplemental insurance programs, such as investigators professional liability insurance, designed for federal employees and their unique exposures. In case you missed it, Wright & Company was highlighted recently in a New York Times article concerning the CIA officer accused of destroying tapes (see here). What a great marketing opportunity. eSpecialty Insurance is your specialty insurance expert. We have developed a streamlined marketplace to provide multiple proposals from a range of competitive insurers, along with expertise to help you evaluate your exposures and choose the best combination... Read more →

Presentations

Guy Kawasaki, author of How to Change the World, has an excellent post on presentations, a subject near and dear to the heart of all insurance sales folk. He has commented a number of times on this topic previously, as have we (see our prior post). In this post (see here) he interviews Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter). This post is a little different in that it does not provide a recipe, just general guidelines on what makes a presentation great. Worth a quick read, at least. eSpecialty Insurance is your specialty insurance expert. We have developed a streamlined marketplace to provide multiple proposals from a range of competitive... Read more →

Doubling Up on Risk - Citizens & SBA

To those of us in the insurance business, an industry built on assessing and transferring risk, the actions of Citizens Insurance in Florida (see here for background) seem a little unusual for an underwriting operation. Not only does it appear that Citizens has taken significant catastrophic exposure with limited resources and little diversification, but now it appears that they have doubled their risk by concentrating their assets in the governmental pool run by the SBA (the State Board of Administration). You might remember that this governmental pool had to freeze withdrawals because of a run initiated by losses from their subprime investments (see here). Citizens had approximately $2.0 billion invested in this pool, and approximately $7.0 billion in total managed... Read more →

Insurance Ads

Insurance advertisements are normally really bad, but it is possible to create funny and effective ads for insurance. Thanks to InsureMe for noting three ads from Trigon Health on their website (see here). And we may not like the direct approach, but the gecko ads are very funny (see here, and, apparently, the first here). The humor utilized outside the US for insurance ads is a little different than what we would normally expect, but some are quite funny (see here, here and - the best – here). eSpecialty Insurance is your specialty insurance expert. We have developed a streamlined marketplace to provide multiple proposals from a range of competitive insurers, along with expertise to help you evaluate your exposures... Read more →

Mississippi Insurance Litigation

We have not spent much time on the post-Katrina insurance settlement litigation going on in Mississippi, or the circus regarding the attorneys involved (see a prior post). However, RiskProf (see here) points us to David Rosmiller of the Insurance Coverage Law Blog and his continuing scrutiny of this subject and the Mississippi AG's office (see here and here). It seems the lead plaintiffs group may be crumbling (see here). eSpecialty Insurance is your specialty insurance expert. We have developed a streamlined marketplace to provide multiple proposals from a range of competitive insurers, along with expertise to help you evaluate your exposures and choose the best combination of comprehensive coverage and price. We look forward to working with you. Read more →

New York Insurance Regulator

We mentioned Eric R. Dinallo, New York’s insurance commissioner, in a prior post because of his unique approach to insurance regulation. He seems to be focused on solutions, not on problems. He is mentioned in a recent New York Times article (see here) for his unique approach to generating a solution for municipal bond insurance in New York: He called Berkshire Hathaway and encouraged them to form a new bond insurer. eSpecialty Insurance is your specialty insurance expert. We have developed a streamlined marketplace to provide multiple proposals from a range of competitive insurers, along with expertise to help you evaluate your exposures and choose the best combination of comprehensive coverage and price. We look forward to working with you. Read more →

Mississippi Trial Lawyer

Trial lawyers are still taking full advantage of the aftermath of Katrina by pursuing insurance companies for what they consider to be bad faith claims practices. A very interesting article on a big-name Mississippi trial lawyer provides an interesting perspective (see here). eSpecialty Insurance is your specialty insurance expert. We have developed a streamlined marketplace to provide multiple proposals from a range of competitive insurers, along with expertise to help you evaluate your exposures and choose the best combination of comprehensive coverage and price. We look forward to working with you. Read more →