Insurance industry-veteran Greg Stefan, Vice President, Risk Control, Arch Insurance Group, Inc, addressed SambaSafety’s Sales and Account Management teams during our yearly Company Kickoff. He provided valuable insight into key risks facing both employers and commercial auto carriers, along with reinforcement of smart risk mitigation strategies, including solutions offered by SambaSafety.
Critical Commercial Insurance Trends
Greg highlighted these critical trends impacting both commercial carriers and employers with any employee who drives for work:
- Despite corporate investments in telematics and camera technology, auto incidents are getting more frequent and severe.
- Increasing auto claims frequency and severity is costing both insurance carriers and employers. Employers with high deductible and self-insured retention programs are seeing severe claims negatively impact their bottom line. Insurance carriers have strengthened rates to improve their results in guaranteed cost auto liability programs.
- Excess and umbrella liability marketplace rates are at an all-time high due to severe losses that have significantly exceeded the underlying liability policy limits.
- Both average claims costs and frequency in most verticals has risen significantly in the past five years.
- Employer legal exposure is worsening due to negligent hiring or negligent entrustment of poor drivers being allowed behind the wheel.
- Risk does not just extend to auto lines – over the past decade, the greatest average worker’s compensation cost per claim has been tied to vehicle incidents.
- Some employers are moving drivers from company-owned to personal vehicles in an effort to manage their risk, but they are neglecting good practices in screening and monitoring those hired/non-owned drivers, creating a material increase in exposure to loss.
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Positive Commercial Insurance Trends
In a more positive development, Greg shared how Arch Insurance Group, Inc. and other commercial auto carriers have seen underwriting criteria become more stringent. Carriers have heightened expectations for what good management of a driving population entails, meaning that it is no longer enough to:
- Have a basic fleet safety policy
- Deploy some technology in a vehicle
- Pull a driver’s pre-hire motor vehicle record and annual check each year
- Provide driver training on a periodic basis
Instead, carriers and plaintiff attorneys have raised the bar and are now looking for substantially enhanced proactive risk management practices for an employer’s driver pool. This includes ongoing driver monitoring if the employer’s insurance coverage extends to the hired/non-owned population.
Upstream Driver Risk Management
Greg concluded his comments by encouraging employers to think of driver risk management steps they can implement as far upstream as possible to get ahead of the rising cost of risk. Employers should start with quality pre-hire screening of potential drivers and post-hire, implement continuous driver monitoring to repeatedly assess a driver’s eligibility to be behind the wheel. At that point, other solutions, such as telematics and camera technology, can be helpfully layered on to expand an employer’s visibility into the management and mitigation of risk.
SambaSafety is proud to partner with commercial insurance carriers with our Volta solution to influence risk pricing. SambaSafety also supports employers at pre-hire, through our MVR partnership with hundreds of the nation’s top background screeners.
Finally, SambaSafety’s Qorta SaaS driver risk management solution provides near real-time, continuous visibility into driver risk for millions of drivers and thousands of employers, efficiently and impactfully helping employers identify and address risky drivers and helping to reverse the rising tide of auto claims.
To discover strategies to combat ongoing insurance challenges, download our free white paper below.
