Profitability is the biggest thing I focus on as the company leaderHere's how I'm going to do it from a financial perspective: I need to issue a policy on your paper, and I will pay you a fee (called a fronting fee) to use your paper, but I'm going to take care of the losses on the back end." You might go to an insurance company and say, "I'm going to self-insure my workers' comp. But in order to do that, you still have to issue a workers' comp insurance policy, because the state requires it, and you're not an insurance company. Let's say that you own a large corporation, and you want to self-insure your workers' compensation coverage for your employees, because you're a large business. Another category of risk would be catastrophe risk, whether it's natural catastrophe or whether it's the newest form of catastrophe, which is terrorism. We primarily invest in government bonds, in things that have traditionally been extremely low risk. The mitigating factors around investment risk are that most insurance companies take an extremely conservative investment posture. Companies collect all this money, and then they try to invest it in the marketplace to try to earn investment income. One category is investment risk. There are a lot of risks an insurance company faces. Number five would be measures of what the Departments of Insurance say about you, because they come in and do market conduct exams where they actually audit your business.Number four would be your customer satisfaction measures. Number three would be market share growth, how big you are relative to your competition. Top-line growth would be number two, how much you are growing your premium base. There are a few major factors in determining success in this business, and profitability would be number one. That's pretty much everything, because you're dealing with a business that has thin margins, and it doesn't take much to turn those positive margins into negative margins. A fronting fee is generally a small percentage, so if they're writing $100 in premium, the fronting fee might be 9 to 10 percent of that, or $9 to $10. |