Book Rolling

[agencynew1]

Hello, I was wondering if somebody could answer a few questions regarding book rolling. It seems you can easily "book roll" your current book to a new carrier, say Travelers. But what happens to the current customers and rates? Does the new carrier honor all current rates and what about the customers? How are they notified and what if they didn't appreciate being rolled over?

 

[Josh]

I'm not aware of a way of rolling your book without rewriting the business.

 

[MrGolf]

It's a pretty big undertaking. Last year our agency lost our contract with State Auto after a 24 year relationship (that's a whole separate story). We had just shy of a $1,000,000 book with them. About $900,000 of it was personal lines. Anyways, we rolled it over to Travelers. During the process there was an agreement that any policy that was within a threshold of the expiring State Auto premium would be automatically issued. On any policy that was over that threshold we would also re-market it to Safeco, EMC, Foremost, etc.

The way we chose to do ours was to send in expiring dec pages on each policy with other pertinent information such as Social Security Numbers, Date of Birth, accident/claim information to the book-roll team at Travelers... On the client side we sent a form letter to each policyholder to let them know that there was nothing they had done wrong and that we were taking care of everything for them and to just disregard the cancellation/non-renewal notice.

I'm just glad to have it behind us. It was a real ordeal. We sustained about 85% of the book which I felt was pretty good, given all things considered.