Bedbugs are a growing problem, not just for homeowners and apartment managers, but also for some of the biggest names in retail (two Abercrombie & Fitch stores in Manhattan were recently forced to close because of the problem, as was an AMC Theater in Times Square).

And if you think these pernicious pests are just a problem for the Big Apple, consider this: although they prefer places with beds where they can come out at night and feed on people, bedbugs are becoming increasingly common in downtown office spaces, even in filing cabinets, in all the metro areas where bedbugs are prevalent. Yes — bedbugs could be living in those file cabinets in your own office.

Why bedbugs and why now? I spoke at length with entomologist and expert witness Lawrence J. Pinto about the rapid growth of this problem, which is often blamed on the FDA’s failure to approve the use of a pesticide as lethal to bedbugs as DDT, which was banned in 1972. Not true, says Pinto, coauthor of “Bed Bug Handbook: The Complete Guide to Bed Bugs and Their Control.”

“DDT was the magic bullet when it was introduced after World War II, but within a few years, bedbugs had gotten resistant to it and the pest control industry wasn’t using it anymore because it didn’t work,” he said. “The chemicals of the day were the reason we got rid of bedbugs in the first place; they were a scourge in the 1930s, but by the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, they were gone. Pest control companies in the ‘70s and ‘80s saw so few cases that they stopped treating for them.”

Although the bedbug problem began to resurface in the mid-1990s, it was still rare. However, in the last 5 to 6 years, the number of bedbug infestations has “exploded” (ewww), Pinto said. According to a recent survey by the National Pest Management Assn., 10 years ago only 10 percent of pest control companies were seeing bedbug problems. The figure is now 80 percent.

At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, the rise in bedbugs can be at least partially attributed to the influx of goods and people from the world’s less developed countries, Pinto said. ”The way international travel changed is the spur,” he said. “Today, the whole world is traveling from places in the world where bedbugs are common. And not just people, but products – if you package something in a box and ship it to New York, it will have potential to contain bedbugs or any other pest.”

The other half of the equation is the “shy and cryptic” nature of the bedbugs themselves. Not only are they good at hiding (in beds, furniture, walls, clothing), they are also prolific breeders and extremely hardy – and adult bedbugs can survive without feeding for a year and a half, Pinto said.

Many apartments spend as much as $100,000 a year dealing with getting rid of intial problem, which doesn’t include maintenance to keep them away, Pinto said. For the typical homeowner, the cost is anywhere from $300 to $1,200, and probably somewhere in the middle. (This doesn’t include the cost of special bedbug-sniffing dogs, which are 96 percent accurate in detecting the pests and cost $300 and up to sniff out a private home.) Treatment, which includes not only the application of pesticides, but steam and vacuum cleaning, usually takes three applications to eradicate the pest. “Bedbugs are the worst problem in pest control, nothing else compares to it,” Pinto said.

And because bedbugs, like termites or vermin, are excluded from personal and commercial insurance policies, business owners are on the hook for cleanup costs. “Bedbugs are considered a maintenance issue,” said Loretta Worters of III, who spends a lot of her time these days talking about bedbugs (http://twitter.com/LWorters). “Insurance coverage has broadened over time.  It used to be insurance just covered fire, then it expanded to include such perils as theft and wind.  But bedbugs, or bugs of any kind, have never been covered. There are no riders or additional coverages that could cover pests,” she added. “I don’t know about hundreds of thousands of dollars, but if it spreads throughout a big building it would be extremely expensive for the building owner.”

In New York, where the pest is most prevalent, legislators are looking for ways around this. Brooklyn Asssemblyman Dov Hikind and Senate Majority Conference Leader John Sampson plan to introduce a bill that would require insurers who underwrite property and casualty policies in the state to offer policies that cover the cost of bedbug infestations. And there is also a bill under consideration (New York State Assembly Bill A10081) to give a tax credit to residents who lose property due to bedbugs in their homes. And only days ago, New York Gov. David Patterson signed the Bedbug Disclosure Act, which requires apartment owners to inform consumers if bedbugs were discovered in an apartment, said Loretta Worters of III.   

It seems to me that some enterprising underwriters could look on bedbugs as an opportunity to craft some interesting coverage that, for a price, could protect businesses against costs related to their eradication. But since this coverage doesn’t yet exist, what should agents tell their business customers about risk management for bedbugs?

Larry Pinto suggests starting with full disclosure if a problem has been detected and is being treated, which could prevent lawsuits in the future. Awareness and early detection are key. “You can control bedbugs in any site if you have the money and cooperation,” he said. “Management must be sure to inspect and treat not only the areas where there are bedbugs, but the adjacent areas as well.” And although prevention is easier than mitigation, it’s sometimes hard to convince management of this, he added. “Your pest control service should be doing regular maintenance focused on bedbugs, and managers also need to make their custodial staff and residents aware of the threat — and if there is a problem, to attack it aggressively.”

There are also some surprisingly low-tech, low-cost ways to prevent a problem, including bedbug-proof encasements that go over mattresses, box springs and pillows, and plastic “insect interceptors” that go under the legs of beds and furniture and trap bedbugs. And because bedbugs are vulnerable to heat, simply putting infested bedding and clothing into a standard clothes dryer is enough to kill both eggs and adults, Pinto said.

I’d love to hear from any readers, especially those in big bedbug cities, about what their customers are saying about the problem. Anyone care to bite? (hahahaha….)

It’s a growing reality that many of you may be personally familiar with: the return of the multigenerational home. And it’s also an opportunity for insurance agents.

According to a recent Pew Report as reported in the Washington Post:

The number of people living with several generations under one roof in the United States is at its highest point in 50 years, as families cope with ruinous job losses and foreclosures…

During the first year of the recession, the number of Americans living in such multi-generational families rose by 2.6 million, or more than 5 percent, from 2007 to 2008.

Now 49 million Americans — 16.1 percent of the population — live in homes with multiple generations. Many include adult children in their 20s…

Young adults are less likely to be married than they once were. The typical age of first marriage is five years later than it was in 1970 — 28 for men and 26 for women…

In a tough job market, many still live with their parents. Pew’sanalysis showed that 37 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds in 2009 were either out of the workforce or unemployed, a nearly four-decade high. The figure includes some college students.

According to the report, the multigenerational trend has been growing since the 1980s, in part because of the economy, but also because multigenerational homes are common for many ethnic groups.

It certainly wasn’t weird for my family. My parents were married right after World War II, and due to the lack of jobs and housing, went to live with my Italian grandmother in her two-flat on Paulina Street in Chicago. Turnaround is fair play: when my parents moved to the suburbs, Grandma came with and lived with us for many years. At one point, so did my Uncle Jimmy and my cousin Millie. It was pretty fun having a childhood in what amounted to a boarding house. Likewise, after I married and had kids, and my mother died, my father came to live with us. 

But the recession is what’s really driving the current trend. One of my best friends currently has her late-20s son, his wife, and two toddlers living with her and her husband. Other households include unmarried, recently graduated children in their early 20s who can’t find jobs.

For independent insurance agents, this trend is just another way to solidify your relationship with your customers. With so many of you now writing personal lines coverage — or doing so to round out a favored commercial client — it pays to ask some probing questions come renewal time.

Things to think about:

• How many additional drivers are on the client’s auto policy?
• With more people living in the home — including the elderly and small children — should the customer increase his/her homeowners’ liability limits?
• Is anyone living in the household running an at-home business (child care, consulting, etc.)? What additional insurance coverages are needed to protect the homeowner and the consultant?
• Is the home being used for the storage of additional property, such as furniture, cars, or “toys” like boats and motorcycles? Is additional coverage needed to protect these items?
• Is everyone in the household covered under some form of health insurance? If not, can you advise them about changes in the healthcare law that will make coverage available to them? And for now, are there options available to them under COBRA or other sources?

The creative agent/broker can come up with many more.

What are your customers telling you about changed conditions in their living situations? And what other coverage questions come up in relation to a multigenerational household?

It’s bad enough that a recent career survey ranked your profession below janitors, bookbinders and even editors (see my related blog, ”At least you’re not a roustaboust“). Now, the latest Forrester Research consumer survey reveals that your customers don’t even find you fun.

The survey, conducted over the Internet last October, gave independent agents an overall score of “okay” from 4,600 consumers who had interacted with a variety of companies. Forrester asked consumers to rate insurance companies on three areas: “meets needs,” “easy to work with” and “enjoyable.” Several insurers, including USAA, Liberty Mutual, Progressive and The Hartford, were ranked “good” by respondents. But when it came to being “enjoyable,” consumers rated independent agents “poor,” while giving them “good” ratings for “meets needs” and “easy to work with.”

What does this mean? Evidently it’s not an ease-of-use issue; respondents ranked agents “good” on meeting customer needs and being easy to work with. And it’s not just a carrier issue, either. Savvy carriers know, and slower carriers are discovering, that it’s not enough to simply provide ease of use through technology and real-time services — in fact, that’s just the starting point (see this related article on Deep Customer Connections’ recent survey on agents telling carriers they need more ease of use).  

From just looking at the numbers, the problem seems to be with the agency system itself, as several carriers got high marks from consumers as being enjoyable to work with. Granted, the results may be skewed because of the focus on personal lines insurance purchasers, but this dissing of insurance agents shouldn’t be the case. It all boils down to the perception of insurance agent as unnecessary middleman, useful perhaps, but more likely just another roadblock between the customer and the underwriter.

The irony is, agents are in a much better position to deliver real customer satisfaction — and yes, even “fun” – than any insurer ever could. In our monthly agency success stories, we speak with agency owners, especially those in small towns or rural areas, who don’t think twice about emergency customer visits, of knowing the names and ages of teenaged drivers about to be added to a family’s auto policy, of engaging customers in intimate conversations to discover their plans for the future and how insurance coverage can help protect those plans. These agencies and their employees are also connecting to their communities through charitable work, recruitment at area schools, and other ways to create engagement with customers and prospects. It’s a testament to the level of service that every independent agent should be providing to valued customers, especially at a time when every customer counts.

And inevitably in today’s world, part of that customer outreach is through intelligently developed and executed social media planning. Maybe that’s where the smart carriers have an edge on agencies — they have the financial wherewithal and staffing to plunge right in. (Luckily, you don’t need these resources to make good use of this new tool: check out ACT’s recommendations for creating a social media policy for your independent agency). 

With more insurers, including traditional direct writers, using multiple distribution methods, the stakes are higher than ever for agents to prove themselves invaluable to their customers — not just by meeting their insurance needs in a smart and timely way, but by engaging with them on multiple levels.

What’s your agency doing to build your brand perception with your customers?

What did surprise me, though, was that agent fraud is the third most prevalent form of fraud being reported by the bureaus, right behind bogus health insurance and drug diversion:

Suspect cases involving insurance agents increased substantially year-to-date in 2009. A total of 69% of respondents said agent cases were up slightly higher or much higher so far in 2009, while a quarter reported no change. Only one bureau said the number of cases involving agents had fallen in 2009.

We contacted CAIF’s Dennis Jay, who minced no words:

Let me be clear upfront: The vast majority of agents are honest and committed to their clients’ best interests. But a small and disturbingly growing minority are painting the entire profession as a bunch of crooks. .

Survey results and CAIF’s own database of agent fraud cases culled from news stories and other sources shows a steady increase in agent cases since 2007 through 2009. “This suggests agent fraud cases may be rising, but also may reflect increased crackdowns by insurers, fraud bureaus, state AGs and other fraud fighters to better detect agent scams,” Jay said. “Or it may reflect both trends. At bottom, agent scams are a significant consumer problem, and constant headache for insurers and state regulators alike.”

Stealing premiums without buying the promised coverage is one of the most common forms of agent fraud. “It’s easy to commit, and can leave clients dangerously uncovered when they have a claim,” Jay said. “Some agents are selling bogus health coverage, which is spreading rapidly around the U.S. We’re also seeing producers selling overpriced life products clients may not need, want or understand. Seniors especially are frequent victims of annuities scams. ”

Crooked agents also are selling “shady investments in non-insurance areas far out of their insurance expertise, and often without a license,” Jay said. “Smaller businesses in high-risk operations also have been sold fake liability coverage or had premiums stolen. They’re vulnerable because liability premiums tend to be high and coverage isn’t always easy to find.”

Agent fraud is the Mr. Hyde opposite of the Dr. Jekyll of agent-as-expert-consultant, with wise guys using their industry knowledge to exploit the average Joe, Jay said. “Dishonest producers coldly exploit their position of trust. They’re authorities in a highly complex, technical arena that most people don’t easily understand. So average, trusting consumers tend to believe whatever agents tell them. This is especially true of seniors, who’ve built up larger portfolios that crooked agents try to drain. The profession’s leadership and carriers also keep urging the public that agents are professionals that people can trust. So when people believe the marketing messages, trust their agent and then get swindled, that leaves a bad taste in the public’s mouth.”

To avoid public backlash, Jay recommended that the industry get behind some serious housecleaning.

The agency community’s associations across all lines should be challenged to aggressively help weed out the bad actors before state legislators take punitive actions and the agency profession’s public image among customers plummets lower. If people think they can’t trust producers, their first temptation might be to try direct writers. There’s so much at stake competitively that the entire agency community, especially the leadership, should aggressively clean out its closet.

Another person asking was Duke Williams, a blogger and consultant on agency Internet use. Last month, Duke decided to conduct an informal survey of “feet on the street results for actual agency Web presence.” His methodology was simple: he used the “find an agent” feature on many insurance carrier Web sites, and Googled the term “car insurance city name state name.” He used the SuperPages, YellowPages and about a half dozen other lists online.

In individually searching several locations in South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Florida, he found:

• 248 independent agencies
• 49 Nationwide agencies
• 19 online-only agencies
• 51 State Farm agencies
• 26 Allstate agencies
• 7 Farmers agencies
• 7 Alpha agencies
• 2 Farm Bureau agencies
• 1 GEICO local agency
• 1 Direct General agency (rregional non-standard auto insurance carrier with owned agency locations)

While these results seem to indicate a strong presence for independent agencies, a closer look tells another story. Of the 248 independent agencies that came up in the search, only 64 — a paltry 25.8% — had a Web site, and only a fraction turned up in the Google “local results” search.

Delving deeper, Duke discovered that the agencies with Web sites weren’t consistent in functionality, even in non-real-time. For instance, 51.6% had quote request forms, but only 12.5% had “request a policy change” forms, and only 20.3% had “report a claim” forms. Not surprisingly, Duke reported that all the national direct writers had very high functionality.

While you could argue that Duke’s results are atypical — focused on a limited geographic area and a single line of business — you’d be missing the point. In every way, direct writers are making it easy for consumers to find and use their products and services — and it isn’t all about price.

Woody Allen once said that “80% of success is showing up.” When it comes to Web pages, the odds are even better if you show up with a functional product that makes it as easy as possible for people to use what you have to offer.

That’s how much it cost me to get back surgery — for my dachshund, Keaton.

No, I’m not nuts. Both I and my living room rug are fully aware that Keaton is a dog, and I’m not the kind of person who buys him holiday-themed doggie outfits, or any outfits, for that matter. But when an animal that’s part of your family is dragging his hindquarters and unable to walk, what would you do? If he was elderly, I might have had him put to sleep, but there’s plenty of life in the old guy yet.

Pet insurance, you say? Nope. Doxies are notorious for back problems and to to top it off, Keaton is a rescue dog, so we have no idea exactly how old he is or who his parents were. Pet insurance wasn’t an option.

Animals today can get better medical treatment than people in Third World countries. The clinic that did Keaton’s surgery has 9 vets on staff, and specialties like dermatology and opthamology. They even offer acupuncture, chiropractic, herbology and water and treadmill exercises for dogs with arthritis and other conditions.

If all of this seems off topic, it might be, except for a recently released Harvard study indicating that medical bills play a role in 62 percent of bankruptcies

 (http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/la-fi-medical-bankruptcy4-2009jun04,0,4495714.story).

The really scary thing is that 78 percent of those people who filed bankruptcy had health insurance, which obviously doesn’t cover everything.

Part of what makes modern medicine so wonderful (and so expensive) is the cost of diagnosis and preventative treatment. A big chunk of Keaton’s hospital bill came from the cost of the spinal MRI, which determined exactly where the vet would operate.

The availability of doggie MRIs is just one indication of how far medical science has advanced. My mother died of colon cancer in 1988. Today, an unpleasant but routine procedure allows doctors to remove precancerous cells before they turn into anything worse. If this screening had been available 20 years ago, my mother might have lived to see her grandchildren.

A November 2008 study by the Brookings Institution  weighs the problem of how trying to squeeze costs out of the health care system could result in a decrease in medical innovation. Mortality rates for cardiovascular disease have decreased 43 percent between 1950 and 2005, a direct reflection of medical innovations. Who wants to make the call to cut those costs? Not me.

http://www.brookings.edu/events/2008/~/media/Files/events/2008/1117_realhealthcare/1117_strategicreview.pdf

A lot of people in our industry are concerned about health care reform. I’m no fan of national health systems, which haven’t seemed to have worked very well in other industrialized countries. On the other hand, after experiencing how expensive it can be to take care of a sick dog, I’d hate to be in a similar uninsured position if the sick person was myself or one of my kids.

Sorry, no answers here to what we should do about health care. I’m just really glad I’m not Max Baucus.

The study of more than a thousand Americans at least 18 years old who own one or more insurance products showed that 73 percent preferred to buy auto and home insurance products from an agent, and 75 percent preferred to buy life products from an agent or trusted source, such as an employer or financial advisor. (The exception is “younger and more affluent” customers, who preferred to buy products over the Web: 39 percent of consumers aged 18 to 24 and 28 percent of buyers with incomes above $60,000 said they preferred online purchases, especially for auto and home products.)

This is a bit of welcome news for independent agents, especially the smaller Main Street guys who are struggling right along with their customers in this tough economy. Am I surprised? Not really, considering that some of the biggest players in the business world are the doing the worst right now.

For years, smaller agents have been bludgeoned with predictions that they’re headed the way of the dinosaur. Ironically, these are the types of businesses that are poised to succeed in the worst economy in decades, probably because they’ve always practiced the ”doing more with less” philosophy that big corporations have just recently been forced to adopt.

The National Federation of Independent Business’s index of small business optimism hit 86.6 last month, breaking a 4-month pattern of declines. And the American Express Open small business monitor of firms with fewer than 100 employees shows that 77 percent think that managing their firms over the last several hard months has made them better at managing their businesses in general.

NPR recently aired a segment on how half the current home foreclosures could be avoided through loan modification. Banks take a massive hit on foreclosed property, so it’s in their best interest to work with troubled mortgage holders to keep them in their homes. Yet amazingly, megabanks like Wells Fargo and Citibank are literally ”not set up” to deal with the problem, even though they saw it coming ages ago–and the bigger the bank, the bigger the problem.

It got me to thinking that the bailout mantra of “too big to fail” could have just as well been applied to the dinosaurs.

Small is beautiful!

Although focused on auto insurance, the report is interesting in its findings about consumer buying practices. The report looked at more than 275,000 auto insurance customers evaluating more than 30 insurance carriers across the industry, including AIG /21st Century, Allstate, American Family, Farmers, GEICO, Liberty Mutual, Nationwide, Progressive, State Farm, The Hartford, Travelers and USAA.

The report finds that in the past 12 months:

30 percent of households with annual incomes below $50,000 shopped for a new insurance carrier, and 45 percent of those customers eventually switched carriers;
26 percent of households with annual incomes of $100,000 or more shopped for a new carrier, and 31 percent of these eventually switched carriers

The message shouldn’t be a surprise: while everybody may be feeling the pinch, the buyers most likely to switch carriers (probably based on price) are those with less revenue at their disposal. I’d extrapolate to say that this probably applies to commercial buyers, too, who are similarly looking to cut back during these tough times.

Another no-brainer confirmed by the study is that increased retention rates are related to bundled insurance products. Retention rates averaged 95 percent among customers who bundle home and auto policies with the same insurance carrier and 92 percent among those who bundle auto and rental policies. Conversely, retention averages only 83 percent among mono-line auto customers and only 85 percent among policyholders who do not bundle their auto and homeowners insurance.

Again, this is a reflection of the fact that the more closely you tie customers to your agency with products and services, the harder it will be for them to move their business over to another agency.

Although the study dealt strictly with personal lines, it paints a clear picture of what carriers can do to make it easier for agents to do business with them.

The results? In measuring agent satisfaction across six factors, the top three drivers were:

* Key carrier contacts (32 percent)
* Policy offerings (23 percent) and
* Claims (16 percent).

I spoke with Jeremy Bowler, senior director of the insurance practice at J.D. Power and Associates (and I’ll be posting an interview with him on our Web site shortly), who discussed some of the other findings.

At a time when we’re coming out of years of cutthroat competition, it’s interesting to see that compensation played a fairly minor role in agents’ decisions to deal with a carrier: Only 5 percent of the more than 1,500 respondents ranked it as a critical factor. However, technology and price were among the six leading factors, at 13 percent and 16 percent, respectively.

The low status of compensation wasn’t the only surprise, Bowler said. In spite of the fact that the survey was conducted in November 2008, with the AIG bailout still fresh in their minds, respondents ranked AIG about in the middle for overall agency satisfaction.

And while products and price were important factors, Bowler agreed that the survey results sent out a loud-and-clear message about the importance of the relationships between the carrier and the agency.

“Personal contact is important, for example, the person who is the key liaison on underwriting is the carrier representative that the agent is dealing with,” he said. “If those folks are not accessible, and supportive and helpful by giving the right answers quickly, the agents will struggle to compete.”

And while technology is important, technology alone is not the silver bullet for agency/carrier relationships. “Some carriers do well on technology, but fall down from the people standpoint,” Bowler said. “A typical agency is appointed to 7 or 8 companies. If all the companies are passing out information but have modest training, the last thing an agency needs is to have to go through an extra process to understand the tools of the trade.”

Interestingly, the J.D. Power study seemed to echo some of the findings of the Big I’s 2008 Agency Universe Study, in which 72 percent of respondents expressed overall satisfaction with their personal lines carriers. The Big I respondents ranked “making it easy for CSRs to write business,” “smooth quoting system” and “reputation with customer/prospects” as the three most improved areas for personal lines carriers — all areas that overlap with the J.D. Power driving factors.

Bowler indicated that J.D. Power was planning on conducting a similar agent survey for commercial lines. They’re a great barometer for insurers to use in fine-tuning their relationships with their distribution forces.

What are the most important satisfaction factors in your carrier relationships? Take a survey on our Web page at:

http://www.agentandbroker.com/ME2/dirsect.asp?sid=E2D3EF32475B4172A42FEE249B241FD4&nm=%3Cb%3E%3Cfont+color%3D%22%23c00000%22%3E+%3E%3C%2Ffont%3E+Take+the+%3Cfont+color%3D%22%23c00000%22%3ESurvey%3C%2Ffont%3E%3C%2Fb%3E

God knows our economy and the property-casualty industry are engulfed by what seems like an endless bank of dark clouds. But the Big I’s new “Agency Universe Study” suggests that there may be a silver lining in there somewhere (or as the optimistic kid said on finding a pile of horse manure under the Christmas tree, “There must be a pony somewhere!”).

First off, the number of independent agencies has stabilized since the 2006 study. Although down from an estimated 44,000 agencies in 1996, this year’s 37,500 is roughly the same as 2006, suggesting that many of the dire predictions about the demise of the small to midsized independent agent may be premature — and that the M&A boom of recent years is bottoming out.

But the real surprise is not the slowdown in M&A activity, but the increase of small (revenues of $150,00 and under),  start-up agencies — 11 percent of survey respondents were founded in 2004 or later (including 4 percent that launched in 2007 and 2008).

Another interesting point that quantifies what I’ve been hearing from agents is that a lot of this growth is around personal lines, especially in the South Atlantic and West South Central coastal areas where direct writers are reluctant to tread (we’ll tackle the personal lines issue in the February AA&B). These new agencies are deriving 48 percent of their insurance revenue from personal lines commissions.

The survey’s other major findings include:

• Declining revenues due to the soft market and shifting premiums, more common among medium-small and medium agencies (with $150,000 to $1.2 million in revenues), with 23 percent reporting average decreases of 10 percent
• More efficient operation through use of technology with fewer employees, with agencies employing 9 full-time employees in 2008 versus 11.2 in 2006
• Improved satisfaction with carriers, with more than one-third finding business planning with their No. 1 carrier very valuable
• Reduced usage of customer service centers, with only 24 percent of agencies using them
• More carrier representation for personal lines, with an average of 6.2 carriers
• Increased concern about controlling expenses and reinvesting

It seems to me that the really good news in these varied findings is that agents are finding creative ways to get around the problems of the economy and the soft market by providing consumers with a viable alternative to the ducks and the cavemen through more efficient service, increased personalization, and a choice of carriers. And that indeed means a pony is in the wings.

To hear a more in-depth perspective of the Agency Universe Study findings, listen to our interview with  Madelyn Flannagan, Big I’s vice president, education and research, at the podcast portion of the AA&B Web site at http://www.agentandbroker.com/Media/PodcastItems/FlannaganFinal.mp3.