Newton Award to New York’s Peter C. Browne

In an advance for commercial property insurers, site-specific exposures can now factor into underwriting models. Verisk has developed a new analytic report that provides underwriters the ability to determine the likelihood of fire incidents and a broad spectrum of non-modelled weather events. The Peril and Incident Report is offered as part of Verisk’s newly enhanced ProMetrix® suite of commercial property data and analytics. The Report provides historical records of reported fire and gas emergency incidents and non-modelled weather events, both  of which will help identify the likelihood of a future adverse event.

Industry experience indicates that insureds typically do not submit claims for incidents that are less than the policy deductible, which may keep carriers in the dark about risks associated with a specific property, according to Verisk. The Peril and Incident Report doc- uments fire and gas emergency reports for the six most recent years available. Those incidents may suggest the presence of risks and lack of  precautions, previously unknown to the carrier, that warrant additional examination. Drawing on data from Verisk Climate, the report also provides details around events, such as hail, wind, lightning, and wildfire. The report includes a trend indication for each of the events, historical occurrences down to the street level of the property for the last five years, the date of the last event, and a hail damage score that shows the probability that a damage-producing hail event affected the property in the past.

The National Association of In surance and Financial Advisors (NAIFA) is proud to announce  Peter C. Browne, LUTCF , co-founder of Price, Raffel & Browne, as the recipient of the 74th annual  John Newton Russell Memorial Award . The award is the highest honor accorded by the insurance industry to a living individual who has ren- dered outstanding services to the institution of life insurance. He will receive the award October 4, 2015, at the NAIFA Career Conference and Annual Meeting in New Orleans.

Peter Browne began his career in the insurance industry in 1962 as an agent in the Rochester agency of the Union Central Life Insurance Company. He was part of the Rochester Institute of Technology School of Business Work Block Program as a college agent. He became the Rochester agency manager in 1964, where he recruited and mentored numerous agents who went on to great success. In 1970, the Union Central Life sent Mr. Browne to New York City as an aspiring manager of the C.B. Knight Agency, which at one time was considered to be one of the country’s largest life insurance general agencies. In 1984, Mr. Browne along with  Arnold Price and  Stuart Raffel founded Price, Raffel & Browne. With offices in New York and Los Angeles, the company is now one of the largest pension and profit-sharing consultants in the United States. He has qualified for the Million Dollar Round Table continuously for over four decades, earning membership in the MDRT Top of the Table for the last 30 consecutive years. He is an inau- gural inductee into the Union Central Life Hall of Fame. As agency managers, Mr. Browne and his partners have won numerous awards, including the President’s Trophy and Crystal Trophy. Mr. Browne served for years on the NAIFA Board of Trustees and as treasurer of the national organization. He is a past-president of NAIFA-New York State, as well as NAIFA- New York City. He has served on the Board of Trustees of The American College and is currently the immediate past chairman of the American College Foundation Board. At The American College, he was instrumental in creating and funding the Larry R. Pike Chair in Insurance and Investments. In 2010, The American College awarded Mr. Browne the President’s Trophy, and in 2012 Mr. Browne was awarded the Huebner Gold Medal along with his good friend and past John Newton Russell Award recipient Alan Press, CLU, LUTCF. Mr. Browne is a past member of the Life Happens Board of Trustees and a past member of the national board of the Life Underwriters Training Council and the board of GAMA International. We wish to extend our personal congratulations to our longtime friend Peter Browne and to Mib and the family on this outstanding – and well deserved – award.