The large U.S. public market offers several features that are attractive to group life companies, including stable blocks of credible experience, business that is often placed on a direct basis, reasonable plan designs and clear administrative objectives.
SCOR Global Life Americas recently completed their survey series of group life plans for the largest public employers in the United States. The series includes reports on each of five major public sectors:
- state universities
- largest cities in the U.S.
- largest counties
- largest public-school districts
- state governments
Each report, sourced from publicly available data, provides the group life carrier and plan design details of each public employer’s plan and summarizes plan design characteristics by coverage. The reports also list the leaders in each sub-market and, in the final report, we determined the overall leader across the public market.
Each public market has its own set of characteristics and competition, so each report gives unique and interesting perspectives. However, the top carriers in each segment are similar, with Securian, Standard and MetLife in the Top 5 of each survey.
The large public market offers several features that are attractive to group life companies, including stable blocks of credible experience, business that is often placed on a direct basis, reasonable plan designs and clear administrative objectives. Disadvantages of this market may include requirement for mandatory and public bids on a periodic basis and financial structures that may limit the financial upside for the insurance company. No matter your view, these are legitimate markets that warrant consideration.
“Our goal with these surveys was to provide insight into the large case public sector market. These comprehensive surveys provide a potential opportunity for a carrier to supplement their prospecting activities so as to capitalize on these significant markets,” said Brian Anderson, VP of Group Life & Accident Reinsurance. Also, the plan designs in the public sector market are generally conservative and persistency also tends to be much better than commonly believed. The SCOR team has deep experience in the large case public market and can provide additional insight if desired.
This report series is currently available for SCOR’s current group life clients. Contact Brian for more information.
