Tom Torcia, Chief Analytics Officer of Mutual Capital Analytics, here with Dan Post, Chief Actuary at MCA. Coming off a trip Dan and I took to a recent NAMIC Management conference event. It was up in Quebec City, Canada. Nice chance to have both travel and an opportunity to meet with some of the members of the mutual industry.
Dan, this is your first management conference, so maybe you can share a little bit about your experience, your perspective and your first trip out there. It was a great conference. Great to meet all these passionate leaders of the mutual insurance space. What I really confirmed in this environment was the sense of community that you got there, the desire of these leaders to connect and to learn from each other and kind of collaborate on that. I thought it was great. Also, some great sessions that I got to go to as well.
Tom, what stuck out to you as far as the sessions that you went to? Great presentations, one that I think I take away and a really meaningful presentation was Bob Hartwig, a professor at South Carolina, gave an really interesting, provocative conversation about the state of the economic environment and how that impacts insurers today.
And I think actually left that with a bit of optimism. Some looming doom, I think, is not as dramatic as some may read and headline perspective. Certainly, what’s probably taking the headline today is the inflationary environment and the impact that it has on carriers and future loss costs. I think June CPI was an interesting data point that helps support his level of a bit of optimism in the in the industry. Bob’s I think was a great presentation, gave a really insightful overview of where we’re headed from an economic environment, from an industry perspective as well.
Yeah, you mentioned inflation. That was really a theme that I heard in a reinsurance panel that we went to as well. The reinsurance panel talked about some of the challenges from 2022 in inflation, in materials prices. Labor prices also talked a lot about weather, the frequency and intensity of some of the large catastrophe events. But again, on the bright side, capacity is starting to come back and there’s signs that reinsurance rate increases aren’t going to continue at the same rate that we’ve seen them.
So bottom line, carriers should really focus on ways to help reduce their reinsurance rates, which would be taking more aggressive rate actions as well as being more proactive with their risk management.
And that’s what it’s all about. This community comes together annually to have dialog. To share, learn best practices, but also have an honest point of view about where the industry is headed. I think that’s what you heard from the from the audience at NAMIC and I think the presentations always do a great job of providing meaningful, impactful content that pairs nicely with the conversations you get to have when you’re when you’re there in person. And there’s really nothing more important than that. Agreed. Awesome. Thank you.