If your client operates in a highly specialized business or has particular needs that are often difficult to find affordable coverage within the traditional insurance market, it’s vital that you partner with a specialty insurance provider.

This will enable your customers to secure the appropriate cover and limits required to protect them and mitigate against their specific risks.

That’s essential, particularly during the current hard market where rates continue to rise and traditional insurers tighten terms and conditions or pull coverage altogether.

One such solution is AmTrust Specialty Programs, a business unit of AmTrust Financial. It’s a one-stop-shop that also includes claims and risk management services and can be customized to match your client’s needs.

With increasingly more business being channeled through managing general underwriters (MGUs), AmTrust Specialty Programs has turned its customized approach into a boon. By providing a deep and relevant product set, it can cater to the diverse needs of these fast-growing entities.

Additionally, as a result of an influx of underwriting talent from insurance carriers into these MGUs, this has opened up more program opportunities. And that’s only going to continue as MGUs become increasingly sophisticated in its operations, data analytics, risk selection and pricing.

“Many of these MGUs have realized that they need a carrier to complement their underwriting and distribution expertise to support their success – whether that’s on the systems, product, actuarial, pricing or the claims side,” said Kathleen Smith, SVP Chief Underwriting Officer for AmTrust Specialty Programs. “That’s where we come in. We’ve successfully built out all of these capabilities and more and have the experience of having worked closely with our MGUs to develop niche strategies that leverage the best from each entity.”

Partnership Building

Kathleen Smith, SVP Chief Underwriting Officer, AmTrust Specialty Programs

AmTrust Specialty Programs partners with underwriting management firms that have best-in-class expertise and in-depth underwriting knowledge in a particular niche or industry segment. By partnering and approaching risk specific to the niche segment in a tailored way, AmTrust Specialty Programs helps support a solution that meets the insureds key needs and remains viable over the long-term.

AmTrust Financial is a leading writer of workers’ compensation. It also provides a host of multiline and monoline coverages for small- to mid-sized accounts in a homogenous class or sector, including commercial auto, general liability, property and professional liability, including directors and officers and management liability.

Each coverage is provided either through the admitted or non-admitted market, or both, based on the insured’s particular needs. AmTrust Specialty Programs can cater to multiple industries, including but not limited to law, aviation, delivery services, street contractors and tow operations.

AmTrust Specialty Programs focus is also on alternative and traditional coverages, typically above $10 million in gross written premium. That aligns best with its underwriting strategy, and solution and design structure.

Central to AmTrust Specialty Program’s successful underwriting strategy is maintaining a diversified specialty portfolio by product, geography, client base and distribution channel, particularly during these challenging economic and geopolitical times. It also hones in on the specialty, non-commodity part of the business, pursuing risks that require specialized underwriting.

“That diversification really came into its own during the pandemic,” said Smith. “For example, exposure on the aviation side of our business went down because flights were restricted, while in other areas, such as trucking, it was going up.”

Claims Services

On the claims handling side, AmTrust has seasoned claims professionals on hand providing 24/7 help. It also runs a state-of-the-art paperless claims system and provides designated claims account managers who act as the point of contact for all claims-related matters. For AmTrust Specialty Programs, the claims service can be unbundled to a specialty operator if it is more appropriate for a particular niche.

As far as loss control is concerned, AmTrust has a nationwide network of representatives who carry out safety inspections, site evaluations and provide loss prevention services. By leveraging its scale, it’s able to provide a broader range of services to more clients. Similar to claims service, AmTrust Specialty Programs loss control services can be unbundled to a specialty operator if needed.

“The key advantage of being a nationwide operation is scale,” said Smith. “On a micro level, companies want to react quickly to new opportunities in new states, so we need to provide them with the services they need.”

“On a macro level, we want to reach out to the best-in-class national insurance providers in a particular segment to partner with them in providing specialized coverage for their clients across the country,” said Smith.

Another key strength is AmTrust’s technology capability. It offers rate, quote and issuance systems to its program partners to enable them to manage their businesses more efficiently.

In addition, AmTrust has a team of experienced in-house programmers who provide customized software solutions to its MGU partners. Its software download capabilities also enable the company to deliver policy information electronically to agency management systems, while accepting data feeds from other systems into its database.

By leveraging firms’ technology, AmTrust can provide an improved service for all. For instance, the insurer provides workers’ compensation to AAA Towing Service, which, in exchange, supplies telematics data, dispatch records and the like, to ensure a more robust risk control program and better analytics, risk selection and underwriting services.

Customized Programs

All of these services can be customized to meet the unique needs of clients. That includes everything from the underwriting and claims guidelines to risk control protocols.

“We tailor our insurance product offering based on the needs of a particular market segment, whether driven by specialized coverage, risk management or claims,” said Smith. “We believe our tailored approach brings more to the end buyer than our competitors that take a more generalist approach.”

“Our long-term commitment to the program segment, wide breadth of product, in-house systems and ability to bundle or unbundle services such as claims and loss control are differentiators in the marketplace,” shared Smith.

For its distribution partners, AmTrust Specialty Programs uses unique admitted and non-admitted paper, all carrying the group financial rating and strength of AmTrust.

Having supported the program marketplace business for more than 20 years, AmTrust Specialty Programs is a well-established, committed player, with several relationships spanning over +10 years. We have been fortunate to be taking advantage of market opportunities, growing by 50% overall in the last couple of years alone. AmTrust Financial currently has $24.8 billion in assets and $3.5 billion in GAAP surplus capital with an A- (Excellent) rating from AMBest.

“At the end of the day, the client wants to deal with someone who is a specialist in their field and truly understands the ins and outs of their business,” said Smith. “That’s what we strive to do here every day at AmTrust: to ensure that we’re always going above and beyond to meet our clients ever-changing needs.”

To learn more about AmTrust Specialty Programs offering, call Kathleen Smith at 860 571 2153, email [email protected] or visit https://amtrustfinancial.com/insurance-products/specialty-programs.

This article was produced by the R&I Brand Studio, a unit of the advertising department of Risk & Insurance, in collaboration with AmTrust Financial. The editorial staff of Risk & Insurance had no role in its preparation.