Due to the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence, data, and analytics, brokers are gaining the ability to treat the risk of each client separately, said Ashley Karg of McGill and Partners. “There’s more opportunity for brokers to embrace individualizing our clients as opposed to creating them as part of a pack, or part of a herd,” said Karg, partner, U.S. casualty during an interview with Insurance Journal at RIMS RISKWORLD. “Using new technologies and modeling, especially in the casualty space specifically, is giving us a big opportunity to differentiate our clients,” she added. The client-broker relationship has improved as each…
Author: Awais
The Insurance Industry Charitable Foundation (IICF) announced the appointment of LoriAnn V. Lowery-Biggers as CEO. Lowery-Biggers brings more than 30 years of experience to the role, having previously served as president of Lloyd’s North America along with executive leadership positions at The Navigators Group, Inc., Wells Fargo Insurance, Inc. and Marsh McLennan Companies, Inc. Lowery-Biggers She succeeds Bill Ross as IICF CEO, who will be developing a multi-year strategy with the IICF staff and executive team in the coming months. As CEO, Lowery-Biggers will be responsible for overseeing IICF’s overall operations and strategic direction and she will report to the…
Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company has successfully secured the upsized target of $350 million of reinsurance from its new Aquila Re I Ltd. (Series 2026-1) catastrophe bond sponsorship, Artemis has learned.Nationwide Mutual ventured back to the catastrophe bond market in April, with an initial target to secure $200 million of multi-peril and multi-year indemnity triggered and per-occurrence based reinsurance protection from this Aquila Re I 2026-1 cat bond transaction. In our first update on this deal, we reported that Nationwide raised the target size to seek between the initial $200 million and as much as $325 million of reinsurance from this transaction,…
NJM Insurance has returned to the catastrophe bond market to sponsor its third transaction, initially seeking $150 million or more in northeast US named storm reinsurance from the capital markets with this Lower Ferry Re Ltd. (Series 2026-1) issuance, Artemis has learned.NJM Insurance is the more commonly used brand name for New Jersey Manufacturers Insurance Company, an American mutual insurance group of companies that offers its policyholders auto and property lines of coverage across a number of states in the northeast US. NJM Insurance debuted in the cat bond market way back in 2013, with a $60 million Sullivan Re…
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger has signed legislation banning the sale and manufacture of certain semi-automatic firearms, prompting immediate lawsuits from gun-rights groups. The limits on ” assault firearms,” as they are described by the legislation, are among two dozen new restrictions and regulations on guns enacted by the Democratic governor in her first few months in office. That marks a sharp policy reversal from her Republican predecessor, who had vetoed many similar measures. “Firearms designed to inflict maximum casualties do not belong on our streets,” Spanberger said in a statement Friday. “We are taking this step to protect families and…
The head of the Federal Aviation Administration will tell Congress on Tuesday the agency failed to act on warnings prior to the January 2025 fatal collision between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army helicopter that killed 67 people near Reagan Washington National Airport. In January, the National Transportation Safety Board said a series of systemic failures by the Federal Aviation Administration led to a devastating mid-air collision that was the deadliest U.S. aviation disaster in more than two decades. “Our airspace system was providing warning signals prior to that tragic evening. The issue was not a lack of…
Providers are reaping high award amounts, and arbiters have “structural conflicts of interest” that incentivize a high volume of disputes, driving up healthcare costs for employers and patients, the groups wrote.
The City of Zurich Pension Fund saw its investments in insurance-linked securities (ILS) strategies delivering a positive return of 6.9% in 2025, while the value of the ILS allocation rose meaningfully in the last year, to around US $1.58 billion by April 30th 2026.When we last reported on the City of Zurich Pension Fund (or Pensionskasse Stadt Zürich) and its investments into the insurance-linked securities sector just over one year ago, the pension had benefited from a 9.2% return in 2024, while the value of its investments in USD had reached just over $1.15 billion by March 2025. In that…
Iran has started a Bitcoin-backed insurance service for shipping companies that want to transit the Strait of Hormuz, the semi-official Fars news agency reported, citing documents obtained from Iran’s Ministry of Economy and Financial Affairs. Dubbed Hormuz Safe, the Iranian government says it could generate more than $10 billion in revenue for the Islamic Republic, Fars reported, without giving a time frame or a breakdown of how the service would work. Iran has effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz — a major conduit for global energy supplies and other goods — since the US and Israel began airstrikes against the…
More than 34,000 homes and businesses remain without power across PG&E Corp.’s service area after a weekend outage due in part to dry and windy conditions that raised the risk of wild fires. There were 659 outages impacting 34,322 customers as of 7:37 a.m. local time, down from 779 blackouts cutting power to nearly 57,500 homes and businesses late Sunday, the utility said on its website. The overall number of outages includes those that are planned to limit the risk of wildfires and unplanned disruptions. Dry wind gusts of up to 50 miles (80 kilometers) per hour risk toppling power…
U.S. product recall activity remained elevated in the first quarter 2026, a new report shows. Sedgwick’s latest U.S. recall report shows the volume of defective products recalled across five U.S. industries rose 27% quarter-over-quarter to 492 million units in the three months of the year. That rise is despite the number of recall events falling 10.5% to 785 events in the first quarter from 877 events in the fourth quarter of 2025. According to the authors of the report, the data indicate that while fewer recalls were announced overall, the scale and impact of individual events continued to intensify. Sedgwick’s…
In less than three minutes, an intruder exploited a security gap at one of the nation’s busiest airports and stepped into the path of an airplane hurtling down a Colorado runway with 231 people aboard. The 41-year-old man slipped unnoticed past motion detectors in a remote corner of Denver International Airport, which sprawls across open plains and covers an area twice the size of Manhattan. He quickly scaled an 8-foot perimeter fence topped with barbed wire, then walked unobstructed onto the runway where he was fatally struck by a Frontier Airlines jet as it attempted to take off late Friday…
In 1996, Guinea-Bissau seemed like an ideal research post for budding pediatrician Lone Graff Stensballe. Her supervisor, a fellow Dane named Peter Aaby, had spent nearly two decades collecting data on 100,000 people living in the mud brick homes of the West African country’s capital. Aaby and his partner, Christine Stabell Benn, believed that the years of research in the impoverished country had yielded a major discovery about vaccines — and what they described as “non-specific effects”: The measles and tuberculosis vaccines, which were derived from live, weakened viruses and bacteria, they said, boosted child survival beyond protecting against those…
California-headquartered Inszone Insurance Services has continued its hot streak of acquisitions with the purchase of Coastal Insurance Services in Florida and affiliated Optimal Insurance Solutions. The acquisition marks Inszone’s first step into the Florida market, the company said in a news release. Coastal Insurance was founded in 2008 by Rolando Gonzalez. He later established Optimal Insurance in Illinois, and the two agencies were combined in 2024. The agencies’ teams are likely to remain in place under the Inszone ownership, the companies said. Inszone, founded in 2002, led the country with 17 merger and acquisition deals in the first quarter of…