Hear and There

Happy to hear from Dan Palmieri, John Di Forte, Joe Coughlin and so many friends over the holidays. Had a lovely dinner with friends and their spouse in Palm Beach: Jim Wrynn, Vince Laurenzano, Marty Carus, and Marsha Cohen. There is life in Palm Beach…up to about 9:00PM.… Am I missing something or is the NAIC going a little overboard in its assumed mandate? Look at the topics covered by the group in this issue.…The Bill S 769 that Senator Breslin has introduced needs work but holds benefit for agents and brokers – see the article in this issue.… According to Amit Unde, Chief Technology Officer for the Insurance practice at LTI, a global IT firm specializing in Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). A.I. can solve several issues for both the insurer and consumer. A.I. can: enhance the quality of search results with contextual relevance rankings; enhance user’s experience by suggesting Google-like word suggestions; be leveraged for developing digital assistants that can parse ‘natural language’ and understand the intent of the requested search; add value by recommending other relevant products/documents that typically go together; do the heavy lifting of classifying and annotating millions of docs to improve the relevance of search. To skeptics like me, the only Artificial Intelligence I would like to see is the brain that I would like to insert into one insurance exec who is wasting time and money on an insanely politically correct initiative instead of sticking to their knitting. Otherwise, I am willing to see what A.I. can do for the business. Agents need not worry about being thus replaced; I have heard and seen the press predictions about A.I.’s value as a replacement and, believe me, it is NOT happening, except maybe in the areas lined up by Unde above.… Speaking of predictions, Scott Walchek
(pictured right), CEO of TROV, a California based international company in InsurTech, has these predictions for his field: consolidation in InsurTech is forthcoming and will be primarily driven by incumbents acquiring to either strengthen or expand their product and consumer offerings; funding for InsurTechs will be harder to come by as VCs tighten their wallets given the extended time horizon accompanying insurance economics; the first cohort of InsurTechs will be reaching their refinancing threshold, and some may not make it; artificial intelligence (AI), particularly for claims and risk selection, will become more nascent while blockchain will fade from the popular narrative; and, mobility will be the battleground for both carriers and InsurTechs, especially concerning micro-mobility (e.g., first and the last mile), and new models employed by OEMs. With all of the conferences springing up on the subject, I hope that he is wrong about the interests of investors.… LICONY President Mary Griffin (pictured above) weighed in on the departure of Maria Vullo (pictured left) as reported in our last issue: “Maria T. Vullo has served the Governor with distinction at the Department of Financial Services.  She has been a strong, energetic regulator and can claim a number of accomplishments during her tenure – including support for principle-based reserving, establishment of the first Insurance Advisory Board, and promulgating the first state-level cyber security regulation in the nation. As Superintendent, Maria was generous with her time and spoke at many LICONY functions, met with companies and our Board, provided insight on compliance questions and set up task forces for industry input on new and proposed regulations. We wish Maria well in her future endeavors.”

We join with Mary and the chorus of those who feel she did a fine job. –SA