Business Process Reengineering and the Performance of Insurance Firms in Nigeria

This study investigated the effect of business process reengineering on the performance of insurance firms in Nigeria, by employing two components of business process reengineering. Survey research design was adopted, through the administration of structured questionnaires on some selected staff of insurance companies at their head offices in Lagos, Nigeria. The research instrument was validated through content validity index (CVI), while the reliability of the research instrument was tested through test-retest method. The findings revealed that, the two components of business process reengineering adopted for this study have individual positive significant effect on insurance firms’ performance and adoption of new process. The F-statistics revealed that the two components of business process reengineering adopted for this study have positive significant combined effect on insurance firms’ performance in Nigeria. The adjusted coefficient of determination implied that, change in insurance firms’ performance is explained by the combined business process reengineering components. It is therefore concluded that, business process reengineering components are important drivers of insurance firms’ performance. It is recommended that, insurance firms should introduce new technology that will aid insurance penetration, especially information communication technology (ICT). The deployment of ICT tends to make it easier for existing and new customers to pick-up insurance policies through their smart phones or personal computers. Furthermore, insurance firms should equally come up with reengineered processes. The process of serving their customers should be enhanced

The Supply of Catastrophe Insurance Under Regulatory Constraints

Klein and Kleindorfer provide a brief overview of the current extent of their research on this topic. The intent of this research is to empirically address interactions across the multiple stakeholders in the Catastrophe Insurance Business, i.e. homeowners, businesses, insurers, reinsurers, the construction and real estate sector, and regulatory institutions. Their analysis is aimed at addressing three questions: What is the structure and performance of the catastrophe insurance market? How do factors such as, interdependencies, profits, risk exposures, and distribution impact the performance of the market? What is the impact of regulation of this market on pricing adequacy, pricing precision, and financial risk? What is the current state of the market, and what future sustainable states of the market are possible? This paper is primarily devoted to describing what authors consider to be the structural drivers of supply and demand and the impact of regulatory controls. These drivers are: "Demand structure" (i.e. why consumers buy what they do) obviously contains several components. Items such as location, demography, price, policy features such as the presence of absence of bundling, "quality" effects such as perceived solvency and claims processes, and finally, how products are distributed, all impact consumer choice. In addition, consumers have other risk management options open to them, the most obvious being where to live, what type of construction to choose and what type of "mitigation", if any to employ. "Supply Structure" describes how the consumer business of insurance is conducted. Salient features would be the degree of competition, geography, profitability, solvency, exposure, loss costs, marketing costs, organizational form, financial structure, and regulatory/solvency constraints. Obviously, insurance companies attempt to maximize profits in the face of these variables "Regulatory Impact" on such things as pricing adequacy, pricing precision, and financial risk has important effects on all parties. In particular the freedom to manage ones risk exposure is critical to everyone from the individual consumer to the largest company, and regulation may produce. In an analysis to come later, the researchers will utilize detailed premium record data obtained from ISO on insurance transactions, supplemented by information on expected costs for different policies and risk characteristics. The data will, for the first time, provide and empirically grounded understanding of the supply and demand for CAT-related coverage provided in residential insurance policies. The study will seek to identify the factors that most affect supply and demand and the magnitudes of their relative effects, including the pricing of CAT coverage and alternative policy provisions.

How customer orientation enhances salespeople’s performance? A case study from an international market

© 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating role of salespeople’s customer orientation on the relationship between sales manager personal characteristics, fellow salespeople’s characteristics, job satisfaction and adaptive selling and salespeople’s performance in the insurance industry in Jordan. Design/methodology/approach: A structured and self-administered survey was employed targeting 500 insurance salespeople working at insurance companies operating in Jordan. The final sample size was 320 salespeople representing a response rate of 64 percent. A Confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess the research constructs dimensions, unidimensionality, validity and composite reliability. Structural path analysis was also used to test the hypothesized relationships of the research model. Findings: The empirical findings indicate that salespeople’s customer orientation fully mediates the effect of fellow salespeople’s characteristics and adaptive selling on salespeople’s performance. Sales managers’ personal characteristics have a direct effect on salespeople’s performance, contrary to job satisfaction that had no effect on salespeople’s performance. Research limitations/implications: This paper has examined only five factors that affected directly and indirectly salespeople’s performance; meanwhile other factors may affect their performance, such as salespeople experience, internal marketing and corporate image. Additionally, the fact that paper’s sample consisted only of insurance salespeople working at insurance companies limits its generalization potential to other industries. Practical implications: The findings emphasize the importance of fostering good relationships among fellow salespeople’s characteristics and adaptive selling strategies. Further, sales managers’ personal characteristics directly affecting salespeople’s performance signifies the importance to hire managers with the right personal approach. Originality/value: This paper represents one of the early attempts that investigate factors affecting salespeople’s performance through the mediating role of customer orientation. Accordingly, the findings shed more light into the strategic role of this construct in enhancing salespeople’s performance. Also, the paper is the first of its kind to build and examine an integrated model of salespeople’s performance in the insurance market of Jordan, which provides valuable empirical evidence concerning the drivers of salespeople’s performance in the insurance industry in Jordan

Ex-Post Behavior In Insurance Markets

Insurance markets are proving to be a fruitful area for empirical work on contract theory. Since much of the theoretical work on contracts is motivated by moral hazard and adverse selection, insurance seems a natural product on which to study the impact that private information and unobservable actions have on contract terms and performance. While several theoretical papers incorporate repeated contracting over time (see Chiappori, 2000, for a review), empirical research has yet to fully address the repeated nature of insurance contracting (Chiappori and Heckman, 2002, and Cohen, 2002, are exceptions). Many insurance purchases are quite persistent over time (Nini, 2004, documents significant persistence in auto insurance). With short-term contracts and repeated interactions, ex-post moral hazard becomes important as consumers have strategic incentives to prevent the revelation of potentially costly information. This is particularly true for drivers involved in a auto accident: making a claim provides valuable indemnification yet reveals information that may lead to future premium increases

The Effectiveness of the Commercial Driver Medical Examination in Screening for Hypertension

The Commercial Driver Medical Examination (CDME) is used to assess the medical fitness of a driver to safely operate a commercial motor vehicle. Hypertension is a disease that has been shown in prior research to cause reduced driving safety performance when not properly managed, and it is therefore important that medical examiners be able to consistently identify it in drivers. However, the CDME has historically been ineffective at screening drivers with safety-related diseases. For example, a report from the US Government Accountability Office showed the existence of a substantial number of drivers who were deemed eligible by the federal government for full disability benefits and yet also passed their CDME’s. To address these issues, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) instituted the Medical Examiner Registry and mandatory training programs for examiners. This project uses data from before these reforms to establish a baseline for comparison to the new version of the CDME. We compare hypertension as captured in CDME records to hypertension as captured in medical insurance claims data on the same drivers. Our initial results indicate that of the 1,320 drivers who were determined from the insurance data to have hypertension, medical examiners were able to correctly identify 74% of them as having the condition. This suggests that while the CDME was moderately successful in screening for hypertension even before the reforms, there was room for improvement.https://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/urs_2018/1000/thumbnail.jp

Understanding Usability and User Acceptance of Usage-Based Insurance from Users' View

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) cover a variety of services related to topics such as traffic control and safe driving, among others. In the context of car insurance, a recent application for ITS is known as Usage-Based Insurance (UBI). UBI refers to car insurance policies that enable insurance companies to collect individual driving data using a telematics device. Collected data is analysed and used to offer individual discounts based on driving behaviour and to provide feedback on driving performance. Although there are plenty of advertising materials about the benefits of UBI, the user acceptance and the usability of UBI systems have not received research attention so far. To this end, we conduct two user studies: semi-structured interviews with UBI users and a qualitative analysis of 186 customer inquiries from a web forum of a German insurance company. We find that under certain circumstances, UBI provokes dangerous driving behaviour. These situations could be mitigated by making UBI transparent and the feedback customisable by drivers. Moreover, the country driving conditions, the policy conditions, and the perceived driving style influence UBI acceptance

Translating Laboratory Measures to Real-World Outcomes: Application of the UFOV® Test in an Insurance Company Setting

Poor performance on the Useful Field of View (UFOV® test) has been linked to negative driving outcomes, such as crashes. The UFOV® test was given to a sample of drivers 75+ years across the state of Alabama (N=2235) as a means of attaining a reduction in insurance rates if successful on the test. Results revealed that retrospectively, participants who failed the assessment were 1.65 times more likely to have an at-fault crash and 1.66 times more likely to have an at-fault insurance claim in the previous five years as compared to participants who passed the assessment. Prospectively, these same participants were 1.85 times more likely to have an at-fault crash and 2.73 times more likely to have an at-fault claim in the subsequent 1.29 years after assessment as compared to participants who passed the assessment. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first translational study to investigate the impact of offering an insurance discount for passing such an assessment on prospective at-fault crashes and at-fault insurance claims

Health Care Cost Drivers and Options for Control

The growth of health care costs remains a serious concern in the United States. Slowing this growth involves understanding what drives health care costs and how to target those drivers effectively. In this brief, we review the relative importance of different health care cost drivers, including insurance benefits design, price inflation, provider incentives, technological growth, and inefficient system performance. We analyze the impact of these factors on the growth of health care spending in the last decade, which has been concentrated in hospitals and felt most acutely in the private market. We find that unit prices and technology remain the most important cost drivers of this recent growth. In reviewing public and private payer initiatives that target health care costs, we find that some have yielded modest results, but the evidence on most strategies is inconclusive or mixed. Designing and implementing effective interventions to slow cost growth remains a challenge, particularly in the privately insured market, where premiums have risen considerably in the last decade

Statistical Analysis Of The Effect Of Work Conditions On Safety And Health In The U.s. Long-Haul Trucking Industry: Evidence From The Niosh Survey Data

Chapter 1 reviews the literature which analyzes the effect of compensation and work conditions on safety and health. Chapter 2 analyzes how truck drivers’ compensation affects their safety performance, using moving violations as a proxy for safety. In addition to drivers’ pay per mile driven, we employ fringe benefits as independent variables. The result suggests that the rate of pay per mile driven, and employment-based health insurance, significantly decrease the probability of moving violations. The result provides support for the hypothesis that high compensation for drivers improve drivers’ safety performance, though other forms of compensation are not significantly related to the incidence of moving violations. Chapter 3 analyzes how truck drivers’ working conditions affect health. We use hypertension as a proxy for health. Hypertension is a common illness among commercial motor vehicle drivers, including long-haul truck drivers. Few studies analyze how working conditions, including wages and work hours, might lead to hypertension among long-haul truck drivers. We hypothesize that long-haul truck drivers’ hypertension is due to excessive work hours rather than age or BMI. Using a multinomial logit model, we find that that longer work hours are associated with a higher probability of suffering from hypertension, as expected. However, drivers who take medication for hypertension also work fewer hours per week, suggesting that they are proactive in reducing their work intensity as well as taking their medicine in order to combat this illness. Since drivers face trade-off between income and health, drivers who take medication for hypertension also seem to accept lower overall earnings by working fewer hours in order to forestall worsening hypertension. Chapter 4 In the trucking industry, truck drivers’ duties include not only driving trucks but also non-driving labor. However, non-driving work is not necessarily paid. This paper analyzes how the payment for non-driving duties (non-driving pay) affects truck drivers’ work hours. This study finds that remunerating drivers for non-driving duties decreases drivers’ work hours. The policy implication of this result is that paying non-driving pay can prevent drivers from working excessively long hours, which may mitigate fatigue. Thus, pay for non-driving labor may possibly enhance their safety and health. Chapter 5 is the conclusion