Pricing/Product Management

Competitive Analysis - Commercial Lines

Pinnacle was approached by a major national commercial lines insurer to provide comprehensive competitive analysis of the businessowners policy (BOP) and commercial automobile insurance market places. Pinnacle’s analysis began with a comprehensive review of the products filed by the leading twenty insurers of these products examining coverage features, rating elements, tiering and scoring elements, unique coverage features and several other key product development elements. Following this initial step, Pinnacle performed detailed territory and premium comparisons for several states using a dynamic premium comparison engine that allowed investigation at the class, coverage amount and territory level of detail. The company used a batch rating feature to develop indicated rate level estimates. Mapping features looking at ranking and pricing differences were also produced. All of this information was incorporated into a countrywide overhaul of the company’s products and pricing.

Product Development

Pinnacle was retained to develop a long haul trucking pricing model for risks with more than 100 powered units. Using publicly available information, a model that incorporated elements of both exposure and experience rating was developed that incorporated differences in geographic location, cargo and trailer type, radius of operations, driver characteristics, prior claims experience, prior insurer, self insured retention, driver characteristics and several other elements. The program was implemented and has become an essential part of a very successful program.

Territory / Summit Analysis

The insurer had not reviewed or adjusted their territorial boundaries in several years; and their current territories were not based upon an analysis of their underlying loss experience.

Pinnacle began with an evaluation of available insurer and external industry data at the ZIP code level as well as their current and future policy processing capabilities. After all of the experience data was adjusted to a common base level, we used our Summit® software product to smooth the data to develop an initial adjusted pure premium by ZIP code to reflect both experience in a ZIP code and in neighboring ZIP codes. The number of additional neighboring ZIP codes used was dependent upon attaining a sufficient exposure level.

The smoothed data was then clustered using Summit® on both a contiguous and non-contiguous basis. The insurer needed to decide whether to maintain relatively contiguous definitions or use more granular and theoretically accurate non-contiguous definitions. Using statistical measures, we identified and graphed optimal definition sets. Non-contiguous definitions were selected by the client. To minimize the number of territories with a limited geographic area or only a few ZIP codes, some manual combination of “outlying” ZIP codes with territories (clusters) with similar adjusted pure premiums was performed.

Finally, we assisted the insurer in developing the necessary filing support material to gain approval. The new program is generating new business in areas of historical profitability but previously less than average competiveness.