What keeps executives of workers' compensation insurers up at night? For most, it is the combination of all of the issues that can affect their business but that are out of their control: Medical inflation. Terrorism. An influenza pandemic. The legal and political environment. Events and issues that can make results for an essential line of insurance often difficult to predict.
Collins understands the challenges facing workers' compensation insurers. We work closely with clients to anticipate these challenges and to develop an efficient and cost-effective reinsurance program to deal with them when they cause results to deviate from the expected.
Collins devotes significant time and resource to staying abreast of current workers' compensation issues. We dedicate time and resource to gathering industry information, compiling peer analysis studies, market share reports and other information specific to workers' compensation. We supplement our own extensive market knowledge with information from the National Council of Compensation Insurance (NCCI), California Workers' Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, state regulators and many other organizations to provide the best possible advice to our workers' compensation clients.
Collins actuarial staff, having worked for primary insurers and reinsurers who underwrite workers' compensation, has this knowledge and expertise and is able to add substantial value to our clients as they analyze the portfolio of risk being reinsured. We utilize company experience and the most current industry excess loss factors from the NCCI to evaluate the expected pricing associated with the structure of the clients' workers' compensation reinsurance programs. Collins also uses powerful and flexible stochastic simulation tools to model the distribution of potential outcomes to help the client understand the range of possible outcomes; not just the expected outcomes. The goal is a program that minimizes a company's exposure to the difficult-to-predict variables that concern workers' compensation writers.
Our catastrophe modeling staff and brokers will work with the client to ensure that the reinsurance program adequately addresses their workers compensation terrorism and catastrophe exposure. To properly utilize workers' compensation catastrophe and terrorism models, the models require that exposure data be provided at a level of detail that most companies don't capture or retain through traditional underwriting. We work closely with insurers to collect, define and model the most detailed information possible, while simultaneously quantifying the impact of any assumptions used to augment available data.
Collins has worked closely with a number state worker's compensation funds. We are actively involved with members of the American Association of State Compensation Insurance Funds (AASCIF), and several senior Collins brokers have, during their careers, placed reinsurance for state fund clients.