State Farm agreed to pay $250 million on the brink of a trial to customers who claimed the company tried to rig the Illinois justice system to wipe out a $1 billion jury verdict from 19 years ago.

A lot has already been written about blockchain and what it is, but for those who need a quick refresher, Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani provided this summation in the January-February 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review, “The Truth About Blockchain”: “The technology at the heart of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies, blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. The ledger itself can also be programmed to trigger transactions automatically.”

Despite increased costs of outsourcing claims adjustment, an extreme wind event this past May serves as a reminder that insurers will continue to need independent claims adjusters and brokers should be prepared to field calls from claimants.

Insurance companies with legacy systems can find it extremely challenging to bring their data together because of different data formats and system access methods.

Given that “there are no 10-year-old blockchain companies” in an industry that relies heavily on historical data, how do insurers assess a submission for insurance related to the distributed ledger?

For millions of Americans, this summer has been marked by climate-related risks. USA Today reported in July that 40 million people from Washington to Arizona were facing an excessive heat warning while in the Eastern US, around 32 million people were under a flood watch during the same period.

As massive wildfires wreak havoc again in California, Nationwide is trying to limit the damage — both to homeowners and to its bottom line.The Columbus-based insurer does business in California and so far has received more than 300 claims from the latest round of wildfires.

Insurance is a business of change and only the flexible and the open-minded have the chance to survive and thrive. That is the mindset of Elizabeth Francy Demaret (pictured), Sedgwick’s chief of staff and executive vice president for carrier relations.

The topic of Industry 4.0 has been discussed at many conferences in recent times. When you talk to participants and colleagues, you quickly realize that everyone associates this buzz phrase with something different.

A CCC executive on Wednesday said the company would soon bring to market software to have artificial intelligence write a partial estimate based on a combination of photos and crash details and hand it off to a human.

In February, USAA launched a 21-member claims innovation team with the goal of gaining competitive advantage for the insurer by digitizing various aspects of its claims operations.

The Institutes RiskBlock™ Alliance announced today that 12 additional companies have joined the risk management and insurance industry’s first enterprise-level blockchain consortium, bringing the total number of member companies to 30.

Rate increases began to bolster the bottom line for reinsurers during the first half of 2018, and insurers saw added income from higher interest rates and a growing U.S. economy, say analysts surveying the sector’s second-quarter results.

Nearly 3.14 million patient records were breached during 142 incidents disclosed during the second quarter of 2018, according to a Protenus report. The report, part of the "Protenus Breach Barometer" monthly series, analyzed healthcare breaches reported to HHS or disclosed to the media from April through June 2018.

US insurers could collectively boost their annual profits by US$20 billion through the use of intelligent solutions like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and data analytics, according to new research from global management consulting firm Accenture.