While the U.S. Treasury dropped a plan for the Federal Insurance Office to collect data on climate-related risks from property/casualty insurers last week, regulators still want to scrutinize what’s going on in the property insurance market.

Related article: U.S. Treasury Drops Plan to Collect Insurer Data on Climate Risks

Instead of the Federal Insurance Office collecting the data to do this, state insurance regulators have united to issue a comprehensive, multi-state data call coordinated by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the NAIC announced last week.

The Property & Casualty Market Intelligence Data Call (PCMI) will gather data from more than 400 property insurers—covering more than 80 percent of the U.S. property insurance market by premium volume.

The data template and related criteria asks property and casualty insurers representing a significant market share of homeowners insurance coverage to submit ZIP-code-level data across the U.S. on premiums, policies, claims, losses, limits, deductibles, non-renewals, and coverage types.

In all, state insurance regulators seek more than 70 data points.

All homeowners insurers subject to the data call will have 90 days to submit their information. The deadline for submission is June 6, 2024.

The data call requests data for the years 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 and 2018.

The public Property & Casualty Market Intelligence Data Call webpage is set up on the NAIC website at https://content.naic.org/industry/data-call/property-ho.htm. The webpage provides a link to a March 12 webinar and includes a Excel report template, showing data fields for individual ZIP code-report year-policy form combinations including “Written House Months in Reporting Year,” “Count of Paid Claims in Reporting Year,” “Aggregate Limits,” “Written House Months in Reporting Year for policies Not Providing Wildfire Coverage,” “Count of Policies with 5% or Greater Deductible,” “Count of Policies with Programmatic Mitigation Discounts,” and many other similar types of data (identifying exposure counts for policies with certain perils omitted or included in coverage, different percentage and dollar levels of deductibles, Coverage A, B, C and D limits, etc.)

NAIC members have agreed to share an anonymized subset of the data collected with the FIO to avoid undue duplication of efforts and compliance burdens on the U.S. insurance industry, the NAIC said.

The NAIC said that state insurance regulators collaboratively developed the PCMI data call under the coordination of the NAIC’s Property and Casualty Insurance (C) Committee, chaired by Alan McClain, Commissioner of the Arkansas Insurance Department.

The charge for the C Committee, set forth in early 2023, was to “assist state insurance regulators in better assessing their markets and insurer underwriting practices by developing property market data intelligence so regulators can better understand how markets are performing in their states, and identify potential new coverage gaps, including changes in deductibles and coverage types, and affordability and availability issues.”

The intent is for the “wide-ranging data call” to give regulators “deeper insights into property insurance market costs, coverages, and protection gaps amid the increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters, escalating reinsurance costs, and continued inflationary pressures.”

Put simply, NAIC President and Connecticut Insurance Commissioner Andrew N. Mais said, “The PCMI data call represents the collaborative, nonpartisan work that state insurance regulators have undertaken through the NAIC to address the critical challenge of the affordability and availability of homeowners insurance and the financial health of insurance companies.”

“We as state insurance regulators are the experts in our individual insurance markets. We are on the front lines every day helping consumers navigate interactions with insurance carriers, and we have the regulatory authority to make sure that insurers make good on their promises,” Mais said.

“The Property & Casualty Market Intelligence Data Call will provide a more holistic view of the property insurance market within our individual states and across the nation,” said McClain. “Many individual states already collect ZIP-code-level data on property markets, but not all states gather granular data on how this translates to availability and affordability of coverage for consumers in some areas. The data call intends to address this insight gap,” he said.

Source: National Association of Insurance Commissioners