Major Consumer and Commercial Lines insurance products

In our last article, we discussed how insurance companies, especially ones with too many products, often face the issue of defining its products. Different departments of such companies maintain different product hierarchies;maintain their own mappings i.e. coverages to products mappings. And often because of too many coverages, different departments end up mapping coverages to products per their understanding, resulting in different mappings or definitions amongst different departments and at company level. We will discuss various consumer and commercial products, and our focus will be on Property & Casualty products in this article. There are a few products, such as Workers Compensation/Employers Liability, Employment practices liability insurance, Commercial Auto, Directors & officersetc. that fall under both consumer and commercial products depending on usage by the insured. We will also discuss various coverages for Auto in this article to make the relationship clear between coverages and products.

Property & Casualty companies usually have products lined up for their Property, Financial, Specialty, Casualty, Personal Lines, Warranty and Accident & Healthbusinesses. Under each of these pillars comes products that carry coverages. A product for one department could be a sub product for another department e.g. Marine Cargo, Marine Hull or Marine Liabilitycould be what one department would like to define as products but other department may define Marine as a product with Marine Cargo, Marine Hull or Marine Liability as sub-products.

A decision should be made at a company level as to how thecompany would like to define a product, keeping in mind external reporting requirements, management-reporting requirements, and reserverequirements, and for its market analysis purposes. A consensus should also be reached amongst departments on how to align coverages to these products to keep definitions of products the same across the company. We will covera comprehensive list of products in this article that could help companies decide how they can bucket their products.