Source: Business Insurance

Matthew Lerner June 25, 2019 Umbrella and excess liability markets are leading the march upward for casualty markets as rates increase and capacity shrinks, according to insurers, brokers and analysts.Commercial auto continues to be a troubled sector seeing double-digit rate increases and even workers compensation, which has seen reductions for several years, is now “flattening,” sources say. For nearly all casualty lines rates are increasing and will likely continue to rise, said James Auden, Chicago-based managing director, insurance at Fitch Ratings Inc., adding pricing is moving up more “than expected” in 2019. It’s “definitely a hardening market,” said Debbie Michel, executive vice president of risk management for Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. in Boston.Umbrella and excess liability risks have seen the biggest changes as rates and premiums rise and capacity is withdrawn, according to market sources.“Without question, that line has experienced the most dramatic change,” said Douglas O’Brien, national practice division manager for casualty and alternative risk in New York with USI Insurance Services LLC.The umbrella and excess liability market shifted substantially in the past six months, he said.USI’s midyear data shows umbrella and excess liability as rising between 5% and 20% in 2019 after single-digit increases in 2018, according to a recent report by the brokerage.“Where we’re definitely seeing a shifting landscape is in umbrella and excess liability,” Ms. Michel said. The excess and umbrella markets are “increasing at double-digit rates,” which will likely continue in the third quarter, she said. In addition, attachment points are rising and limits reducing, as some insurers pull out of the market.For umbrella coverage, “where $1 million was somewhat the norm, you’re seeing markets say they want to attach at $2 million and higher,” Mr. O’Brien said. And where a lead umbrella limit previously was $25 million, $10 million to $15 million is “the new normal.” “We’re seeing customers and prospects being faced with reduced capacity,” Ms. Michel said. “Lead umbrella might be more like $10 million than $25 million,” she said. Policyholders “are trying to patch together capacity and trying to maintain the capacity they’ve had,” Ms. Michel said. “Sometimes depending on the size of the company, that can be pretty difficult.”The two biggest factors in terms of capacity, Mr. Auden of Fitch said, are American International Group Inc. changing limits and its underwriting appetite in many lines, as well as “a lot of changes in capacity at Lloyd’s.” Replacing that capacity in the market “it’s not as easy as you think,” Mr. Auden said.Larger risk management accounts have been the most affected by changes in the excess and umbrella markets, but the shift has “trickled down” into middle-market accounts as well, Mr. O’Brien said. Another difficult line of business is commercial auto coverage, sources said. “We expect rates to continue to go up” in commercial auto, Mr. Auden said, as even after several years of rate increases, the market remains “unfavorable” with deficient reserves.Commercial auto has been a challenge for many years, with transportation losses driven in part by large jury awards, sometime in excess on $10 million, Mr. O’Brien said. “We don’t see a reversal of that” in 2019, Mr. O’Brien said. At some point, rates will get to levels adequate against losses, but “we’re not there yet,” he said.Data from USI shows primary auto liability up 5% to 10% and sometimes higher in 2019 for accounts with good loss histories and up 15% and higher for poor loss histories. Auto liability “is our number one exposure,” according to Eric Spalsbury, director of risk management in Dublin, Ohio, for cleaning company Stanley Steemer International Inc. Auto liability rates are climbing, Mr. Spalsbury said, with double-digit increases.Even workers compensation, which has seen rate declines in recent years, is beginning to see some upward firming, they said. “Comp has been a profitable line for the industry over the past five years, but it has seen some pretty significant rate reductions,” Ms. Michel said. “As a result, we’re feeling like it’s bottomed out to more of a flattening line now, and we potentially could see upticks.” Mr. Spalsbury said his company’s comp spend has been flat for some three to four years. “Our comp, while it tends to be a larges expense, we’re not hearing a lot about comp rates going up,” Mr. Spalsbury said. General liability is seeing less severe changes than then umbrella risks and auto. “We are seeing a more modest firming in the general liability space,” Ms. Michel said. “GL has been inching up,” Mr. Spalsbury said. “One-offs such as bodily injury, those things tend to be very expensive,” with litigation sometimes exacerbating costs.

Source: Business Insurance

Gloria Gonzalez June 25, 2019 Zurich Insurance Group Ltd. has pledged to utilize 100% renewable power in all global operations by the end of 2022 and to stop writing certain thermal coal and oil sands risks after two years as part of its commitment to achieving the goals of the Paris climate agreement.Zurich is the first insurer to commit to set targets in the framework of the UN Global Compact Business Ambition Pledge that aims at limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, according to a statement by the insurer published on Tuesday. The Paris climate agreement included pledges from 195 political leaders to hold the global average temperature to well below 2 C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 C, although the Trump administration announced in July 2017 that the United States would pull out of the agreement.

Source: Business Insurance

Thomson Reuters June 25, 2019 (Reuters) — Hackers broke into the systems of more than a dozen global telecom firms and stole huge amounts of data in a seven-year spying campaign, researchers from a cyber security company said, identifying links to previous Chinese cyber-espionage activities.Investigators at U.S.-Israeli cyber firm Cybereason said on Tuesday the attackers compromised companies in more than 30 countries and aimed to gather information on individuals in government, law-enforcement and politics.The hackers also used tools linked to other attacks attributed to Beijing by the United States and its Western allies, said Lior Div, chief executive of Cybereason. “For this level of sophistication it’s not a criminal group. It is a government that has capabilities that can do this kind of attack,” he told Reuters.Mr. Div later presented a step-by-step breakdown of the breach at a cybersecurity conference in Tel Aviv in the same session that the heads of U.S. and British cyber intelligence units and the head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency spoke. “Right now we’re still tracking them,” he said. “On Saturday we debriefed more than 25 different telcos, the biggest telcos in the world.”A spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry said he was not aware of the report, but added “we would never allow anyone to engage in such activities on Chinese soil or using Chinese infrastructure.”

Source: Business Insurance

June 24, 2019 Dutch insurer ASR Nederland N.V. is considering denying coverage to gambling companies, nuclear-power generators and armaments producers along with coal miners, Bloomberg reported. Jos Baeten, chief executive of ASR Nederland, said that the proposed ban would apply to new policies and the insurer will continue to cover all of its existing contracts.

Source: Business Insurance

June 24, 2019 The World Bank Group’s catastrophe bond will make a partial $60-million payout to Peru after an 8.0-magnitude earthquake struck the country on May 26, Artemis.bm reports. The $200-million cat bond is part of the World Bank’s Pacific Alliance bonds covering quake risks in Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru.

Source: Business Insurance

June 24, 2019 Several major airlines are rerouting their flights to avoid areas around the Strait of Hormuz in the Middle East after Iran shot down a U.S. military surveillance drone on June 20, WWMT.com reported citing sources. The airlines include Australia-based Qantas Airways Ltd., British Airways P.L.C., KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and Germany-based Deutsche Lufthansa A.G. among others.

Source: Business Insurance

Thomson Reuters June 24, 2019 (Reuters) — Rivals to Lloyd’s of London are riding a rising tide of marine insurance rates, leaving the 330-year-old market behind after it jettisoned sections of its oldest line of business last year. Premiums for marine insurance, which until 2018 had fallen for years due to rising competition and lower claims, are increasing after a surge in catastrophe losses in the past two years and growing geopolitical tensions.For Lloyd’s, still reeling from two years of losses due to the heavy claims from natural disasters, it will still take 12-24 months before the segment returns to profit, Chief Executive John Neal told Reuters in New York last week. Mr. Neal said that although the sector had performed better in the first quarter, syndicates needed to set “the right price” for the risks and consider whether all types of marine business were insurable after Lloyd’s told its 99 members to cut the worst 10% of their business last year.Broker Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. said in a February report that 10 Lloyd’s syndicates have withdrawn or reduced their marine business. That has benefited the smaller London company market, which operates separately in the City. “We are definitely seeing business from Lloyd’s coming through our door,” said a senior London company market insurer.Marine cargo rates are up 12%-14% this year, Miles Taffs, head of marine and aviation at Lloyd’s for MS Amlin, said, while sources say yacht rates have risen by at least 20%, and by triple digits in some locations.

Gloria Gonzalez June 21, 2019

Source: Business Insurance

 The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board is deploying a four-person team to investigate an explosion and fire at a Philadelphia refinery complex. A fire ripped through the Pennsylvania oil refinery on early Friday — 11 days after another fire broke out at the same facility, according to Reuters. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration earlier told Business Insurance that the agency was investigating the incident at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions site. CSB investigations look into all aspects of chemical incidents, including physical causes such as equipment failure as well as inadequacies in regulations, industry standards and safety management systems, the board said in a statement on Friday.

Source: Business Insurance

June 18, 2019 (Reuters) — A state-backed cyberattack could secretly corrupt the records of British financial institutions over a period of months, posing a risk that banks would probably struggle to guard against on their own, a senior Bank of England policymaker said. Banks have focused mainly on stopping service outages, but the falsification of transaction records and other data was an even bigger danger, Anil Kashyap told lawmakers on Tuesday. “If you wanted to do maximum damage, that is what you would probably do if you were a state actor,” he told a parliament committee. Britain’s security services have warned about the risk of cyberattacks by Russia and other countries, and the BoE has urged banks to boost their preparedness to avoid disruption to one of the world’s largest financial centers. But British financial institutions might not be able to guard against this type of attack on their own, Mr. Kashyap said. “If you think it is a state actor, I don’t know if you think any particular firm can defend itself,” he added. Attacks on bank records would be especially damaging as it would not be easy to identify which records were accurate and which had been corrupted. “You have this difficult situation where you have to restore the system, where you could be restoring a corrupt system,” Mr. Kashyap said. Financial institutions also risked focusing too much on dangers that would damage their individual reputations, rather than threats to the system as a whole, such as overreliance on a handful of providers of cloud computing services. “I don’t really care if bank ‘x’ is offline for a week, even if it’s disastrous for their share price, if the services that they provide, that are critical, can be delivered in some other way,” Mr. Kashyap said. “What is tricky is it could be the case that the (bank) board’s incentives of what to worry about are misaligned with the general incentives.” He also said the BoE would keep a close eye if major technology firms begin to rapidly gain market share in financial services. Earlier on Tuesday, Facebook said it was launching a digital currency and payment service for its users. Mr. Kashyap, a finance professor at the University of Chicago, was speaking to parliament’s Treasury Committee which was examining his reappointment to the BoE’s Financial Policy Committee, which monitors risks to the banking system.

Source: Business Insurance

June 18, 2019 (Reuters) — Bayer AG has asked a California judge to overrule a $2 billion verdict by jurors who found the company’s glyphosate-based Roundup weed killer responsible for a couple’s cancer, arguing the jury decision was not supported by evidence. The German drugmaker and chemicals company in court filings on Monday in Alameda County Superior Court in Oakland blamed the massive verdict on “inflammatory, fabricated and irrelevant evidence” from the couples’ lawyers. “The resulting trial focused not on ascertaining the truth regarding the state of the science, causation, and compliance with legal duties, but instead on vilifying Monsanto in the abstract,” the company, which bought Monsanto last year for $63 billion, said in motions filed with the court. Bayer faces Roundup cancer lawsuits by more than 13,400 plaintiffs across the United States. It denies the allegations, saying the weed killer and its active ingredient glyphosate is safe for human use. The verdict and two prior jury decisions against Bayer have triggered steep declines in Bayer shares, leaving it with a market valuation of $56 billion. Bayer asked Superior Court Judge Winifred Smith, who presided over the roughly seven-week long trial, to reverse the jury decision and enter judgment in Bayer’s favor, or order a new trial. The Oakland jury on May 13 awarded more than $2 billion to Alva and Alberta Pilliod, finding their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma to have been caused by using Roundup to kill weeds on their property between 1975 and 2011. The jury awarded $18 million in compensatory and $1 billion in punitive damages to Alva Pilliod, and $37 million in compensatory and $1 billion in punitive damages to his wife. Bayer in its court filings called the punitive damages excessive and unconstitutional, and asked Smith to toss or significantly reduce the award. The large punitive damages award is likely to be reduced due to U.S. Supreme Court rulings that limit the ratio of punitive to compensatory damages to 9:1.