Pricing/Product Management

Personal Lines

Pinnacle was approached by a national insurer that wanted to develop a more sophisticated homeowners rating program. Their current homeowners plan was a traditional rating approach and was only based on a few factors, and the company felt they were not taking full advantage of the potential in the homeowners market. Pinnacle, through the use of predictive modeling, assisted the carrier in designing a new rating and tiering structure, which included the introduction of by-peril rating and new territory definitions. This new structure allowed the company to be more precise in rating homeowners, resulting in more adequate and competitive rates for a broader spectrum of risks.

Rate Filing Review

Pinnacle typically provides state regulators expert review of company and bureau rate change filings. In a recent review of a Company’s automobile rate filing Pinnacle was able to confirm that the filed rates met the State’s rating laws and Department’s filing requirements. Using a procedure developed by Pinnacle specifically to review rate filings, the Company filing was reviewed against generally accepted actuarial principles. The Company was questioned on certain rating procedures and was able to support their procedures and selections with additional documentation to the filing. Pinnacle was then able to affirm to the Regulator that the filed rates were not excessive, inadequate, nor unfairly discriminatory and that the new rates would not produce any major policyholder dislocations. The Regulator was then able to acknowledge the Company’s filing with confidence that the Regulator had carried out his charge of providing service and protection both to consumers and to the insurance industry.

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.