john-karlenHope you had a wonderful holiday season. For the staff of MTMIC, it went by quickly. With over half of our policyholders renewing on January 1 it has been a busy office time.

File reviews, gathering data, reviewing losses, loss control reports and getting shop operation updates from our policyholders takes time. While it is still too early to give you the “numbers” for January 1, our early indication is that we have renewed about 98% of our policyholders. We will share the final numbers with you next month. A couple industry trends are apparent. Most of your shops are busier now than last year. Not everyone, the results are “lumpy”, yet in aggregate, payrolls look to be up about 8%. Another interesting finding is that many of our policyholders have added a new product line and/or new significant customer. I was surprised how much your shops have changed and adjusted to new products and/or customers. Our policyholders ARE creative and pushers. Not much of this helps you in workers compensation, but the market intelligence is interesting. Maybe one piece of MTMIC trivia. How much payroll do our policyholders anticipate in 2014? A big number – over $1,100,000,000.

A change we did see for January 1 is an increase in the state individual account experience modification formula. This change increases the values of an individual company’s losses into the rating formula. The impact of this is that bad experience raises the modification factor higher than in the past. By the same token, good experience lowers the experience modification more than in the past. If you had a reason to embrace loss control initiatives, the reason became more rewarding January 1, 2014. This change impacts all policyholders as they renew after January 1. For anyone that is interested in the statistical detail of this change, call me.

For our January accounts thank you for renewing. For all of our accounts, the MTMIC staff works daily to provide local individual policyholder service and support that a large multi-state insurance carrier cannot achieve.