How the CFC looks to address the small business insurance gap

Small businesses still face hurdles when it comes to accessing some commercial insurance products, said one of the company’s senior CFC leaders as she shared how MGA hopes to address this issue with technology.

“We have realized that there are significant barriers to entry for many clients [to specialty commercial insurance]Shannon Gruber, CEO of CFC USA, told insurers at the CFC Summit 2023 in Chicago.

With clients finding it difficult to fill out detailed orders, brokers, according to Groeber, were, in some cases, “too intimidated about how to talk about so many different products, so many different solutions—the natural tendency was to just walk away from those Conversation or not follow through.

The CFC uses technology to research the digital risks of its insureds online, tracking the IP addresses and IP addresses they connect to and scanning for vulnerabilities, and attendees are heard during the session. The idea behind the latest update was to expand on that and gather additional data points available, from permits and registrations to new products and partnerships, attendees were told.

“[We realized] If we just expand our scope, we can start gathering additional information; “More things like risk for the tech company, or for the small professional service providers in the US,” Gruber said during a presentation.

The result, Gruber told insurers, is that brokers can get more quotes in front of the 33 million small businesses in the United States without having to ask for such detailed information. It is a task that previously proved to be a tedious chore for the insured and ultimately acted as a deal-breaker that led customers not to take advantage of the cover.

“Often, there are few employees, there may be a single employer, and the applications ask a lot of questions that they may not necessarily have answers to, or that are not relevant to their business,” Gruber said of the target companies. . “So we thought if we could supplement that information, we could get information that we find valuable rather than having them bring it to us, then we could get more broker quotes for their clients, and help them make that sale by giving them more detailed information.”

“Now brokers can do multiple product lines at the same time – we have the technology and diverse professional responsibility that they can quote at the same time and deliver together,” Gruber said. “These products are such that, for the last 20 years, as long as we’ve been talking about the Internet, there have been assumptions that some of that risk is passed on to E&O.

“It makes sense to put these coverages together with the same carrier and less worry about which policy will respond.”

Further expansion of the platform is on the cards, with the addition of CFC’s full suite of administrative responsibility products.

“[We want to focus] In these small companies, individual business owners, or some with a small number of employees, but actually tailor it to their specific interests rather than talking about D&O [directors & officers] In the context of large public companies where those risks don’t translate, so the products that are available don’t necessarily create that value,” Gruber said.

CFC is building an additional insurance agreement into the D&O that Groeber described as effectively repeating what it did for the Internet but looking at events specifically targeting top executives.

“They can have personal protection, they can know that if they are harmed specifically from a reputational standpoint, or if there is false information on a website, we will help them remove that information, repair their reputation and bring them back to a previous level online,” Gruber said. “And if they suffer any kind of personal financial loss as a result of this cyber event, we will cover that as well.”

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