Storm Chasers: ICAT Covers Catastrophes from Coast to Coast
Like the tornado chasers in the movie “Twister,” International Catastrophe Insurance Managers LLC (ICAT) keeps pushing into new territory where others hang back. ICAT, which currently underwrites catastrophe risks in California, Texas, Florida and the Pacific Northwest, recently announced its entry into the Mississippi and Alabama markets. The plan is to take on North Carolina and South Carolina within the next 60 days, according to ICAT Senior Vice President Greg Butler.
“We are quickly becoming a coast-to-coast company,” Butler said. “We are getting a national reputation and we’re working with national wholesalers now that are putting program business into the catastrophe
coverage.”
Formed as a managing general agent in July 1998, ICAT provides commercial catastrophe insurance coverages to small and medium-sized businesses in higher-risk regions of the U.S. Coverages include monoline earthquake in California, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Alaska and Hawaii; and monoline wind-hail coverage in coastal areas of the Gulf and Atlantic Seaboard states.
“People in New York are selling earthquake for us in California; people in California are selling windstorm for us in Alabama,” Butler said. “It’s working perfectly, and they control the business already—so, especially in those states, we’re the alternative for the windpool. For the small businesses that are forced into coverage with the windpool, there’s no business income or ordinance-and-law coverage.
“ICAT delivers a complete solution to the agent to be able to take care of all their catastrophe needs without going to the state windpool to do part of it and the E&S market to do another part of it.”
ICAT’s unique website (www.icatmanagers.com) allows insurance agents and brokers to communicate electronically with ICAT, with underwriting applications pro-cessed in “real time” and an immediate turnaround. Butler said it takes “three minutes to get a windstorm policy—it’s pretty slick.”
ICAT sells through both retail brokers and wholesalers and is in excess of 500 relationships overall nationwide, grown from about 50 when it first launched in California. The company has a regional vice president in Texas (Jimmy Squires) and Florida (Hank Foster), and is currently looking to fill the same position in California.
Staying in touch with its network of agents and brokers is part of ICAT’s game plan. CEO Jack Graham recently held a series of meetings with some of ICAT’s wholesalers in California with the purpose of finding out: “How are we doing? What do we need to do differently? How can we improve?” Butler said they’ve received mostly “rave reviews,” aside from some suggestions for minor form changes and different marketing approaches.
“We’re getting real good responses from our reinsurers [including Swiss Re and AXA Re] because they’re beginning to see the discipline of our underwriting. A good example is when we opened up business in Florida, we got overwhelmed in the first 90 days in Southeast Florida where Hurricane Andrew went through—there’s a lot of pent-up demand there. We had to actually slow down business there…that really proved ourselves to the reinsurance market.”
Following the North and South Carolina rollout, ICAT will “call a timeout” until the end of the year, Butler said. Early next year they plan to jump back in with Louisiana, Georgia and Virginia, as well as expanding in Oregon and Washington. Like all good storm chasers, ICAT’s job will be to stay on its toes.