You don’t need to be an insurance wiz to have good coverage, but it helps to know some of the terminology your agent or insurance company might use.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll continue to go over some insurance terms that YOU should know. Feel free to go back and read last week’s post, explaining the term “No-Fault”.
Today we’ll discuss Loss Runs.
Loss Runs – Have you ever applied for college? If you have, you probably had to send your transcript to the schools you were applying for. The schools needed to see what your grades were like before they accepted you into their program.
When quoting a commercial policy, we often are required to provide the quoting underwriter a current loss run report. This is a report provided by your current company that shows what losses, if any, have occurred over the past few years. Usually, either three or five years are required to be reviewed.
You may ask, “Why are these necessary?” These reports are important for insurance companies. It's sort of like that transcript we were talking about before.
They want to provide you with the most competitive pricing that they can while still maintaining profitability. If you’ve previously had some claims, and were not a profitable risk for your current company, what indication would the quoting company have that things would be any different? By the same token, if you haven’t had claims, that’s a pretty good indication that you should have a similar track record moving forward.
Here in New York State, companies are required to provide your loss run report within 10 days. The ordering of this report is an indicator to your current agent that you are shopping your coverage.
Unfortunately, some agents, despite having the ability with many companies to run a loss run report in their office in a matter of minutes, will hold off until the tenth day. This allows them an opportunity to submit their own applications, thereby blocking the quoting agent’s access to companies that they may hold in common. This is a despicable practice and not one that is followed in our agency.
If you have questions regarding commercial insurance or any other type of insurance, feel free to call us at 607-535-6501, or stop by our office sometime during the week.
Our 4 Insurance Terms You Should Know series will continue two weeks from now. In the meantime, make sure to read our post next week, "Don't Buy Insurance From Your Television Set".