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Viewpoint: The Cyber Risk Pendulum

Article 0 Comments Privacy risk is so 2014, right? Ten years ago, numerous retail and healthcare companies were hit with data breaches related to the exposure of credit card or healthcare data. Given many data breach claims, which included fines by state attorney generals and the payment card Industry, the cyber insurance market focused on privacy risk. This focus remained until 2017, when ransomware claims developed into more substantial matters, triggering large business interruption losses for carriers. Underwriters accordingly focused on ransomware exposure to minimize the potential for business interruption claims. However, in 2024, with new state privacy laws and renewed interest from the plaintiffs’ bar, carriers are once again seeing privacy claims, based on biometric, pixel, or chat technology. While ransomware has not gone away, attacks have evolved from network encryption to the theft and ransom of consumer or confidential corporate information. The cyber pendulum has swung back to privacy risk. Stephanie Snyder Frenier While all 50 states have data breach notification laws, many states have passed comprehensive privacy bills following the model set by the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA). According to the International Association of Privacy Professionals, and...

Hub International Acquires Mitchell Sandham Inc. 0

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Hub International Acquires Mitchell Sandham Inc.

Acquisition Enhances Commercial and Personal Insurance and Employee Benefits Services in Ontario Chicago, IL (Feb. 12, 2024) – Hub International Limited (Hub), a leading global insurance brokerage and financial services firm, is pleased to announce  that it has acquired Mitchell Sandham Inc. and its subsidiary, Mitchell Sandham Group Benefits Inc. (collectively, Mitchell Sandham). Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Located in Oakville, Ontario, Canada, Mitchell Sandham is one of the oldest and largest independently owned insurance brokerages in the Greater Toronto Area providing commercial and personal insurance, and employee benefits services. “Mitchell Sandham has a strong reputation in the market for delivering outstanding client service and building a high-achieving sales team,” said Susan Murphy, President of Hub Ontario. “We are excited to have them join Hub. They will help us continue to advance our growth strategy in the region.” “After experiencing exceptional growth over the past 10 years, we began the 12-month journey to find a strategic partner that will help us accelerate our growth into the future,” said Aaron Nantais, CEO of Mitchell Sandham. “Joining Hub will give our clients and employees enhanced resources and expertise, including a broader geographical reach across Canada and the US.” “I was...

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Morgan Stanley Seeks to Offer Mutual Fund ETF Share Classes

Morgan Stanley Investment Management has joined a growing list of investment firms seeking approval to include ETF share classes for its mutual funds, a structure long employed exclusively by Vanguard Group. The asset manager filed an application with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Jan. 29 seeking approval for the dual-fund structure, which only Vanguard is currently permitted to do, multiple news outlets note. Morgan Stanley’s application, if approved, could potentially become far more significant to Wall Street than the recent landmark debut of bitcoin spot ETFs, and could reshuffle trillions in assets, Bloomberg reported. Ben Johnson, Morningstar’s head of client solutions and asset management, posted on X, formerly Twitter, that six firms have now filed ETF-as-a-share-class applications: Morgan Stanley, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Fidelity, First Trust, F/m Investments and Perpetual US Services (PGIA).

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Dartmouth Basketball Players’ Labor Victory Only Start of Path to Union Deal

Article 0 Comments A ruling that gives the Dartmouth basketball team the right to unionize has far-reaching implications for all of college sports — from the quaint, academically oriented Ivy League to the big-money football factories like Michigan and Alabama. But it’s not time to cut down the nets just yet. Although last Monday’s ruling by a National Labor Relations Board official put the players on the path toward a union, they have a long way to go — years, maybe — before they would be able to sit down with the school and negotiate a collective bargaining agreement. Dartmouth has said it will appeal the regional official’s decision to the full NRLB; another loss for the school there could send the case into the federal courts, where an outcome is unlikely before most of the current players have picked up their diplomas and moved on to jobs that are unlikely to include professional athlete. Only then would the two sides sit down and decide what the players are worth. And others will be watching. “We are excited to see how this decision will impact college sports nationwide,” Dartmouth players Cade Haskins and Romeo Myrthil said in a statement on...

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Super Bowl 2024 Highlights NFL’s Aging Billionaire Problem

What You Need to Know The NFL was responsible for 93 of the 100 most-watched TV broadcasts last year, and brought in nearly $20 billion in revenue. Growth has created succession-planning challenges — and could force the doors open for investors driven by financial imperatives. Bringing in institutional owners and private equity investors could help teams raise capital and give minority partners a way to cash out. When she was nine years old, Virginia McCaskey attended the first NFL playoff game, at Chicago Stadium in December 1932. The Chicago Bears, coached by her father, George “Papa Bear” Halas – the team’s founder and owner — beat the Spartans of Portsmouth, Ohio, by a score of 9-0 to become the then 12-year-old league’s champions. Moved indoors because of a blizzard, the game, a precursor to the annual championship now known as the Super Bowl, was played in front of about 11,000 people on a 60-yard field using dirt and manure left over from a traveling circus. One punt hit the stadium’s organist. Two years later, a radio station owner paid $7,952.08 (about $180,000 in today’s dollars) to buy the Spartans and move them to Detroit, where they now play as the Lions. Now, the 101-year-old McCaskey owns...

15 Hottest Up-and-Coming U.S. Housing Markets: 2024 0

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15 Hottest Up-and-Coming U.S. Housing Markets: 2024

Start Slideshow In November, the high mortgage rates that had been weighing on the housing market started to trend downward from their nearly 8% peak in October, reaching as low as 6.6% in mid-January, according to a recent report by The Wall Street Journal and Realtor.com.  In response, both pending and existing home sales leveled off in December, with bigger declines averted by lower mortgage rates. The housing market is unlikely to return to balance this year, the Realtor.com 2024 Housing Forecast suggests, but it will move in that direction. Still, buyers continue to find limited inventory. The report noted that low buyer demand and possibly even lower seller activity is bolstering prices, which rose by 1.2% annually in December and remained about 37% higher than pre-pandemic levels at the national level. Homes spent four fewer days on the market than in December 2022 but still remained there two weeks less than before the pandemic — an indication of low for-sale inventory. According to the report, demand in affordable locales keeps inventory conditions tight, price growth strong and time on market snappy, even though housing activity remains constrained nationally.  The most recent Wall Street Journal/Realtor.com Emerging Housing Markets Index identifies housing...

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Birny Birnbaum Gives Up NAIC Consumer Rep Role

Birny Birnbaum has ended his 25-year run as a funded consumer representative at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Birnbaum, the executive director of the Austin, Texas-based Center for Economic Justice, first became an NAIC consumer rep in 1999, when he took over from the center’s previous executive director, Victoria Benitez. Birnbaum said in an email interview that he decided not to reapply because he no longer felt his work at the association was doing much good. “I think there are more effective ways to promote and achieve improved consumer protection, greater availability and affordability of insurance, address structural racism in insurance and stop the numerous unfair and deceptive practices in life insurance and annuities than attending NAIC meetings,” Birnbaum said. What it means: Financial professionals who follow the NAIC may have a harder time understanding it now that Birnbaum is no longer providing his plain-English analyses of its work. Consumer reps: The NAIC, a group for state insurance regulators, created the consumer rep program in 1992. The group pays for the funded reps to travel to NAIC meetings and speak up for consumers. Other, unfunded reps pay their own meeting-related travel bills. Grace Arnold of Minnesota is the regulator who serves...

Online Policy Self-Servicing, Support and Quoting Capabilities Set Leading Insurance Carriers Apart 0

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Online Policy Self-Servicing, Support and Quoting Capabilities Set Leading Insurance Carriers Apart

Wilmington, Del. (Jan. 23, 2024) – Keynova Group, the principal competitive intelligence source for digital financial services firms, is pleased to announce the results of the Q4 2023 edition of its semi-annual Online Insurance Scorecard, an evaluation of 12 of the largest U.S. auto and property insurance carriers’ website capabilities. Progressive once again earns first place for its online user experience, achieving the highest overall score. Trends identified in Keynova Group’s Scorecard show the leading insurance carriers advancing digital policy management with innovations to drive accurate and efficient policy changes, self-servicing and expanded online quoting and servicing for an array of policy types. “Carriers are increasingly implementing nuanced capabilities that facilitate policyholder decisions and expedite policy-related actions,” said Beth Robertson, managing director, Keynova Group. “When effectively implemented, these online solutions defray the expense of live agent interactions while also building policyholder engagement through positive digital experiences.” Key Findings: Self-servicing Advances Enhance Policy Updates Carriers continue to advance digital capabilities that enable policyholders to efficiently locate information and complete tasks online. As policy updates are an important area of expanded self-servicing, 75% of Scorecard carriers now enable some or all policy updates to be initiated and completed online with immediate updates...

Chicken Processing Plant Fined $393K for Endangering Ohio Employees 0

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Chicken Processing Plant Fined $393K for Endangering Ohio Employees

Article 0 Comments A chicken processing plant – with a long history of violations ‒ continues to ignore federal safety regulations and expose workers to multiple hazards while they process chickens for commercial sale, federal inspectors found. Inspectors with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration opened a follow-up inspection under the agency’s Severe Violator Enforcement Program at Case Farms Processing Inc. in Winesburg, Ohio on Aug. 7, 2023. OSHA found machine guarding and OSHA found machine guarding and trip-and-fall hazards in the facility’s live hang department that were substantially similar to violations cited in a previous case. OSHA cited the company for three repeat, seven serious and four other-than-serious violations for not using required lockout/tagout procedures, not training workers in such procedures, a lack of machine guarding to protect workers from contact with operating machine parts and exposing workers to fall and electrical hazards. The processing plant faces $393,449 in proposed OSHA penalties. “Case Farms Processing continues to ignore federal safety regulations to protect workers on the job. Returning to a facility to find similar violations identified in previous inspections demonstrates a callous disregard for the safety of workers,” said OSHA Area Director Larry Johnson in...

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Louisiana Furniture Retailer Settles Race Discrimination Lawsuit for $105K

Article 0 Comments A furniture retailer and lessor based in Louisiana has agreed to pay a former employee $105,000 to settle a race discrimination lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency announced. Affordable Rent-to-Own, LLC, doing business as Affordable Home Furnishings, subjected an African American manager to a hostile work environment and fired him when he complained, the EEOC found. According to the EEOC’s lawsuit, a white account manager at Affordable Home Furnishings’ Florida Boulevard store in Baton Rouge repeatedly used the word “n****r” while working with an African American manager-in-training. Soon after the manager-in-training reported the slurs to other managers, the company fired him, the EEOC says. Such alleged conduct violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits race discrimination and retaliation for complaining of discrimination. The EEOC filed its suit (EEOC v. Affordable Rent-to-Own, LLC d/b/a Affordable Home Furnishings, Civil Action No. 3:22-cv-00676) in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana. Under the three-year consent decree settling the suit, approved today, Affordable Home Furnishings will pay the former employee $105,000 in back pay and damages, and also conduct training; revise policies; set up a complaint hotline;...