This blog serves many purposes, at least in my mind. Among them is to bring to the reader information he or she may otherwise not have access to, and another is for me to investigate things in the insurance and ERISA fields that I am interested in. I think both of these purposes are well served by a recent discussion between the blog and Robert Kingsley, who until last year was the President and CEO of Financial Pacific Insurance Company, a California based insurer; Rob left the company after closing its sale to the Mercer Insurance Group. Rob spoke with the blog recently to provide some insight from inside the insurance industry:

Blog: You have certainly had a close up view of the trend towards consolidation in the insurance industry, having just overseen the sale of one insurer to another. Any thoughts on whether this trend will continue, accelerate, or instead slow down?
Rob: In a declining rate environment with the pressure to grow and companies flush with capital there is little doubt the pace of consolidation will accelerate.

Blog: Is the trend towards consolidation a positive or instead a negative for the industry?
Rob: I think consolidation is a good thing for any industry so long as the markets remain competitive and the barriers to new capital and new ideas remain relatively low. The fact of the matter is that smaller, entrepreneurial organizations innovate in ways the larger companies, due to their sheer size, are incapable of.

Blog: What about for the consuming public?
Rob: So long as the market remains competitive the trend toward consolidation will help consumers. For one thing, as companies grow through consolidation they achieve greater economies of scale in their expenses and a portion of the savings will be passed on to consumers in the form of lower rates.

Blog: What is driving the urge to merge in the industry?
Rob: The industry is over capitalized and companies have made certain growth and profit growth ‘promises’ to investors, which are simply not achievable through organic growth.

Blog: Big insurers, smaller insurers? Who’s got the bigger upside at this point?
Rob: I may be biased (having a small company background) but I am a believer in the small insurer. I think they generally know their markets better and react and respond to opportunity more effectively than their larger counterparts. It’s not a universal rule, but on average, smaller niche companies have outperformed their larger peers. Conning has performed a couple studies on this subject.

Blog: There is probably no bigger consumer of legal services than the insurance industry. From your point of view of having led a company that consumes those services, what is your biggest complaint about lawyers and the services they provide to clients?
Rob: The big disconnect is that the lawyers are selling time and the insurance companies are buying results. That’s all I say about that subject (note my wife is an attorney).

Blog: What’s the single biggest thing lawyers could do to better serve clients like the company you headed?
Rob: Financial Pacific had (has) an in-house law firm that handled 80% or more of our litigated cases. The reason we formed that firm was to change the economics of the loss adjustment process. When a carrier is paying an hourly fee to an attorney it can affect the carrier’s settlement appetite and price point. Turning that variable cost into a fixed cost allows the carrier to cleanly evaluate the merits of the litigated case without being affected by the ‘meter is running’ mentality. Law firms that are sensitive to that dynamic and/or are willing to be evaluated and compensated based on their results (their outputs) as opposed to their inputs (hours) would be valuable and highly coveted.

Blog: Rob, thanks for your time.