I'm looking to get a better understanding of rolling a book of business for future reference. At what point did or would you decide to do roll it, when the commisions are higher at another company, when rates start getting out of hand or when things aren't working out with that company? Do you roll at renewal, do you do it right away or gradually? Do companies care when you roll it or is it just part of the business? I'm assuming you tell the clients the rates are better with ABC company?
Rolling a Book of Business
- Thread starter Johnboy
- Start date
My advice is it's not something I would voluntarily undertake. If you have reached the point of a book-roll then you probably have reached a point where you and one of your carriers are no longer having a beneficial partnership.
We've done it once at our agency with a book that was right around $1,000,000; it is a mountain of work even with a carrier's book-roll team helping the process. A carrier, won't say whom, canned us after a very profitable 24 year relationship for both parties. One "shock loss" for about $800,000 basically did it in, even though they denied that was why. The carrier had went through the state (Kentucky) slashing agents left and right. Think they saw it as an easy way out of one more appointment. We ended up moving the book to Travelers.
The way we did it was just starting as the policies renewed. We would send in declaration pages with any updated and pertinent information to the book roll team and they'd take it from there. Simultaneously, we were sending form letters out to each insured before they got their non-renewal notice from the carrier explaining what was happening and that it was nothing they had done. It was not something I want to do again for a while, if ever.
We've done it once at our agency with a book that was right around $1,000,000; it is a mountain of work even with a carrier's book-roll team helping the process. A carrier, won't say whom, canned us after a very profitable 24 year relationship for both parties. One "shock loss" for about $800,000 basically did it in, even though they denied that was why. The carrier had went through the state (Kentucky) slashing agents left and right. Think they saw it as an easy way out of one more appointment. We ended up moving the book to Travelers.
The way we did it was just starting as the policies renewed. We would send in declaration pages with any updated and pertinent information to the book roll team and they'd take it from there. Simultaneously, we were sending form letters out to each insured before they got their non-renewal notice from the carrier explaining what was happening and that it was nothing they had done. It was not something I want to do again for a while, if ever.
- 1,581
How much of that $1,000,000 book were you able to roll? Why on earth would a carrier shed that much premium especially if only looking at a shock loss year? Were they pulling from your entire state/?
- 620
How does it work when you are rolling your book and the new carriers premiums are way off?
We rolled about 75% to Travelers, moved about 15% to another in house carrier and probably lost somewhere just shy of 10% to the natural effects of something like this. We walked away feeling not to bad about it, you kind of just know going in that you will lose some of the business during the process... In my opinion they were looking to cut the bulk of their agents in Kentucky (which they did) and this just proved to be an easy way out for them. That's my theory anyways. I know they cut a lot of good agencies that year that otherwise were/had been mainstay shops for them.
Someone else asked about how the premium comparison worked. In our case we had an agreement that anything within a threshold (I think it was 12%, I can't remember) could be automatically issued. If it was outside of that it was at our discretion whether or not to issue.
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