Monthly Archives: December 2011

Despite more than $100 billion in disaster losses around the world this year, insurers are not yet experiencing a broad and sustained increase in pricing power, defying predictions from a year ago that even half those losses would be enough to turn the industry around. For investors, that means picking winners in 2012 will be […]

Cyber breaches are on the rise and taking longer to resolve. For businesses that experience a cyber breach, it takes an average of 14 days to resolve the attack and costs an average of $17,696 per day.¹ In spite of this, you may be finding that your customers don’t realize just how important cyber liability […]

The disasters that plagued the globe this year will send 2011 into the record books as the most costly year for catastrophes on record. Japan’s powerful tsnuami, earthquakes in New Zealand, floods in Thailand and a series of severe tornadoes in the U.S. all contributed to $350 billion in disaster losses, according to a new […]

A mounting U.S. deficit could pose a much greater threat to the survival of President Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms than either the Supreme Court or 2012 elections. Many health experts say innovations in delivering medical care and the creation of state health insurance exchanges for extending coverage to the uninsured are likely to continue in […]

Had Japan been more fully insured for earthquakes, 2011 would have set a record for insured catastrophe losses. As it stands, 2011 will see approximately $108 billion in insured manmade and natural catastrophe losses, second only to 2005, when insured catastrophe losses reached $123 billion, according to a Swiss Re sigma analysis. The total for […]

Difficult economic times like these are always accompanied by an increase in employee fraud claims. While most employees are honest and trustworthy burdened by financial stress, otherwise honest employees may be tempted to steal from their employers — the economic pressure allowing them to rationalize the criminal act and downplay the risk of being caught. […]

Want to Reduce Cyber Risk? Avoid These 25 Worst Passwords of 2011 . On way to help lower personal and business cyber risk is to avoid using easy-to-crack passwords. SplashData, a password management application maker, recently compiled a list of the 25 worst passwords for the year 2011. The research results were based on millions […]

Some in the insurance industry are staking their futures on the reputations of others. That is, they are looking to insure reputational risk. With the boom in social media, interest in reputational risk has itself boomed. The term refers to a company’s risk of having its reputation damaged because of certain events or incidents and […]

The Travelers Companies CEO Jay Fishman said at a financial conference yesterday that his company raised rates for business insurance customers by 5.2 percent in October, followed by 5.8 percent in November, according to a news report. The Wall Street Journal reported that Travelers CEO Fishman offered these comments at a Goldman Sachs financial services […]

When you hear the U.S. government now requires all health insurance plans to cover a certain medical procedure, it may feel like a win for consumers. The part they don’t tell you is what this new mandated coverage is actually costing on the back end – hence driving up premiums. One mandate in New Jersey […]