Delivering value for ISO customers during a challenging year

December 16, 2020 / 3 min read

It’s impossible to look back on 2020 without reflecting on the profound personal and professional disruption that so many of us have and continue to experience. The historic public health and economic crisis have forced us to rapidly adapt to new ways of working, serving customers, educating our children, and participating in civic life.

At ISO, we began the year with an ambitious agenda of product and program enhancements and the launch of new solutions for our customers. Like many businesses, we soon recognized that responding to the multidimensional challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic, while sustaining the strong momentum of our original initiatives, would be central to our 2020 agenda.

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The work continues in earnest, but I wanted to share some of the major initiatives and updates that we undertook this year.

Insights, strategies and insurance solutions related to the COVID-19 crisis

ISO moved quickly to help customers track and analyze the potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic across various lines of business. In March, we launched an online resource page that harnessed the collective insights and analysis from multiple Verisk and ISO products and business units. Our COVID-19 initiatives are wide ranging and include:

Legislative and regulatory monitoring: We created two webpages and a dedicated email newsletter to aggregate and help insurers monitor developments at state departments of insurance and COVID-specific legislation and regulation.
Strategic insights for a new normal: To help personal lines insurers navigate the emerging new normal, we undertook an extensive analysis of driving habits and investigated the possible ramifications of the pandemic on homeowners insurance. We stood up a dedicated page to help personal lines insurers find these and other strategies for success.
Key program updates: ISO responded to the pandemic with several optional endorsements for our commercial property and personal auto programs and information on a forthcoming rules revision for businessowners and general liability programs.

Enhancing the value of ISO solutions

Beyond our COVID-19 initiatives, we rolled out a number of significant product enhancements across multiple lines of business, including:

General liability: This program is getting one of the most significant updates since its inception. Some of the highlights include a robust modernization of the classifications including the introduction of new classifications with associated rules and loss costs, and more explanatory information.

Commercial auto: Thanks to advanced technologies and connectivity, many of today’s vehicles are more vulnerable to novel perils, like hacking. Our first-to-market Auto Hacking Expense endorsement tackles the emerging risk of commercial auto hacking.

Homeowners: Claims arising from underground utility wires often come as an expensive surprise to homeowners, who don’t notice damage until they experience a loss of service. To address this issue, we introduced a new endorsement that can be used to provide coverage related to underground pipes, wires, and some buried equipment from a range of perils. We’ve also introduced associated rules and loss costs.

These are just a few of the updates we’ve made to our insurance programs. We’re also made several improvements to the user experience. To give our customers more lead time to implement changes, we’re now announcing our multistate filings several months earlier in the filing lifecycle. We’ve also launched Filings, a new feature within ISO circulars to help insurers learn why a forms filing was made, what ISO content is changing, and the potential impact of that forms filing on a line of business.

To learn more about what we did in 2020, and what we’re planning for 2021, ISO customers can download our Year in Review on ISOnet (log-in required).