Kicking off the Book of Business Rating Report
Bluewire has spent the past three years designing, developing, and marketing its Severity Risk platform for the trucking industry. Our primary customers are transportation insurance producers, underwriters, actuaries, claims adjusters, executives, and marketers. Retail and wholesale brokers, carriers, excess, captives, RRG’s, MGA’s, TPA’s and reinsurance all participate in building a defensive wall against the onslaught of the predatory trial lawyers. The Reptiles have mastered the art of extracting money from one or more of these insurance layers. The cost of insurance has surged and shows little sign of slowing down.
This comment from ATRI’s 2022 study on rising insurance costs sums up the challenge:
“Despite reductions in insurance coverage, rising deductibles, and improved safety, almost all motor carriers experienced substantial increases in insurance costs from 2018 to 2020. Premiums increased across all fleet sizes and sectors, with small fleets paying more than three times as much as very large fleets on a per-mile basis. One-third of respondents reported cutting wages or bonuses due to rising insurance costs, and 22 percent cut investments in equipment and technology – potentially creating future safety and driver shortage concerns.”
Source: American Transportation Research Institute
I sometimes describe what Bluewire does as a kind of data-driven smoke detector. Our analytics platform is fine-tuned to look at every interstate motor carrier operating in the United States, and when we spot smoke, the alarm goes off and our customers in that insurance tower are notified of what we see. Our findings are reported in nine severity categories and the top-level Bluewire GAP Score. We are a proactive way of reacting to smoke before it becomes fire.
Reptile-trained lawyers watch for the same smoke. They see all the safety violations (publicly available), crashes (publicly available), and insurance filings (publicly available) of every DOT-authorized motor carrier (publicly available). The plaintiff bar spends millions of dollars annually on billboards to attract injured parties who jump at the chance to pay 30% or more of any award to these plaintiff firms. Billboards are not randomly placed. They are placed on the roads and highways that have the highest incidence of crashes (publicly available) and in legal jurisdictions that are friendly to the plaintiff. The American Tort Reform Association has dubbed these Judicial Hellholes©.
Today, we’ve published a dashboard on our public website. We’ve taken the same (publicly available) data and compiled it into a dashboard to rate how much smoke is pouring out of the book of business of every insurance company in the FMCSA’s (publicly available) License and Insurance filing database. Almost 1,100 insurance companies are in the dashboard. We’re not revealing the specifics of each insured motor carrier (we could), but we are rating the relative volume of smoke coming from each insurance carrier's book of the trucking business. Our customers can, of course, see those details as subscribers to our data platform.
Have a look and try the dashboard. Then ask yourself if you have a modern, data-intensive, A.I. smoke detector continuously monitoring your book. And please, don’t tell me it's CSA Scores. CSA couldn’t find a barrel of oil-soaked rags sitting next to your furnace.