ISO's New Businessowners Program Simplifies Rating and Expands Coverage Eligibility

January 1, 2011 / 3 min read

JERSEY CITY, NJ, June 3, 2002 — Insurance Services Office, Inc. (ISO) has introduced a new Businessowners Program (BOP) — a package policy providing broad property and liability coverage in a single contract for small and midsize businesses — by overhauling many existing coverage provisions and adding new features to enhance coverage. The announcement was made at the IASA Conference in San Francisco.

ISO's new BOP 2002 program, effective beginning this July in 42 jurisdictions, simplifies the existing policy forms and rating system, expands the number of risk categories eligible for coverage, incorporates a new Businessowners-specific classification table into the BOP section of the Commercial Lines Manual and introduces:

new coverages, including computer coverage, business income from dependent properties coverage and fire extinguisher system recharge expense; and
new optional endorsements, including coverage for food contamination, water backup and sump overflow, functional building and personal property valuation, liquor liability, employee benefits liability, and several coverage and exclusion options for pollution liability.

"The new BOP is a self-contained program, enabling insurers to reduce policywriting expenses with a simplified rating and policy-issuance system," said Domenick J. Yezzi, Jr., ISO's vice president for specialty commercial lines. "The manual also provides an enhanced Businessowners classification table and expands eligibility rules to include motels, self-storage facilities, and combined restaurant, convenience food and gasoline risks," Yezzi added. A cross-referencing section has been added to make it easy for insurers to locate information within the manual, he noted.

The new BOP provides a simplified policy form to replace the three existing forms necessary to write coverage. The new policy form includes many features of the old forms and adds a new "named peril" endorsement that modifies the policy to cover only the causes of loss in the current standard property form.

The ISO program also simplifies the existing rating system with a new factor-based methodology that streamlines insurers' workflow.

New Delivery Platforms
Insurers can choose to receive the new BOP loss costs and rating factors through ISO IntegRater™. With BOP advisory loss costs and rating factors on ISO IntegRater, insurers can incorporate ISO information into their rating and policy-issuance systems faster, more accurately and more easily than through conventional means. With the addition of BOP, ISO IntegRater now delivers information on ISO's general liability, commercial property and commercial package policy lines.

Insurers can also choose a turnkey solution with AscendantOne™ Inc.'s web-based RateFocus™ and PolicyFocus™ quoting and policy-issuance applications, powered by ISO. ISO recently took an equity position in AscendantOne, a Nashua, N. H., technology and services company that develops insurance applications.

Following BOP, AscendantOne's RateFocus and PolicyFocus solutions will be gradually rolled out for the rest of ISO lines of business.

"It's all about choice, flexibility and speed of delivery — whether insurers want ISO BOP advisory loss costs, manual rules and policy forms information via ISOnetSM, or only the rating information through ISO IntegRater to load data into their systems, or the turnkey AscendantOne product to begin rating and issuing policies immediately," Yezzi noted. "With the array of new coverages and optional endorsements, and with our advanced electronic delivery methods, ISO BOP supplies customers more information for making sound pricing and business decisions more quickly."

ISO is a leading source of information, products and services related to property and liability risk. For a broad spectrum of commercial and personal lines of insurance, ISO provides statistical, actuarial, underwriting and claims information and analysis; consulting and technical services; policy language; information about specific locations; fraud-identification tools; and data processing. In the United States and around the world, ISO serves insurers, reinsurers, agents, brokers, self-insureds, risk managers, and insurance regulators and other government agencies.

Release: Immediate

Contacts:
Giuseppe Barone / Erica Helton
MWW Group (for ISO)
201-507-9500
gbarone@mww.com / ehelton@mww.com