There’s a rapidly growing market for businessowners policy (BOP) programs, and fortunately for insurers and their customers, the tools to help meet the demand are more advanced than they’ve ever been. But BOP is a challenging and nuanced market spanning many segments and sizes of small business, from gig workers with minimal assets to sizable physical locations where millions of dollars change hands.

U.S. Census data shows that new business formations exceeded 300,000 in four of the past five years, based on final 2018 and 2019 data and estimates for 2020 through 2022. Verisk MarketStance° data shows the resulting growth in BOP premiums, which increased 17.5% from 2021 to 2022 as the economy rebounded after the pandemic. A further 10.3% increase is projected through 2023.

Sizing up and seizing the opportunity

How can insurers narrow the field of potential customers to businesses that fit their specific risk appetite, specialization, and geographic targets? A new Verisk white paper, Where Going Small Can Be a Big Deal, explores how an insurer can create a blueprint for a BOP program and construct it with purpose-built tools for optimizing every aspect of the business.

At the exploratory stage, granular data broken out by risk classification and refined to the ZIP code level can be critical in helping identify and size possible markets:

• Robust premium and loss experience data, such as that found in Verisk’s ISO DataCube, can drive essential analytics for benchmarking, ratemaking, underwriting, strategic planning, and product development. Powered by contributory data from participating insurers, DataCube can help compare opportunities across multiple dimensions of risk and deliver visual analytics via the Market Landscape tool to aid actuaries and decisionmakers in seeing the broader picture.
• Building a BOP program also calls for context and holistic perspective. Verisk’s MarketStance solutions can distill and synthesize geographic, industry, and size-of-business data into reports and visualizations that support critical strategic decisions. Supplemented by premium forecasts and prior industry loss experience in the commercial property, general liability, and auto lines — in addition to BOP — MarketStance’s integrated solutions can help insurers spot trends and opportunities to support enterprise strategic planning for profitable growth.

Tools such as these can make the heavy lift of launching a BOP program easier to manage. And with a full range of data, analytics, and technology to support the next steps, insurers can find a profitable place in a small-business market shaped by new technology, evolving business models, changing regulations, and emerging risks.

Learn more about solutions to ease entry into the BOP market—and sustain that business across the value chain—when you download the white paper, Where Going Small Can Be a Big Deal.