Episode 22: New URMIA Insurance Program

Get the inside scoop on URMIA’s new member benefit: the Student Property Insurance Program (SPIP)! This affordable insurance program covers the personal property of individual students, faculty, and staff of member institutions. Coverage applies whether the individual is living on or off campus, including while studying abroad or away on internships, externships, or other experiential academic opportunities. Alex Aycock of Gallagher, who oversees the new program, talks with host Jenny Whittington to provide the details.

Show Notes {URMIA member login required}

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Transcript

Jenny: Hello everyone, this is Jenny Whittington, and welcome to URMIAmatters. I am so pleased today to be interviewing Alex Aycock with our new Student Property Insurance Program that Gallagher is helping to administer. So, welcome Alex. 

Alex: Hi, Jenny. Thank you for having me.

Jenny: Sure. So I love to start off my interviews with folks just giving me a little bit of history, you know, how you got into the insurance world and how long you’ve been with Gallagher. Can you just give us a little bit of history about yourself? 

Alex: Sure, so I’ve been with Gallagher for about 10 years now. Started with Gallgher out of undergrad with the University of Georgia, so I’d say I’m one of the rare people who actually sought out a career in insurance-brokerage business out of college. I was in a family that had several family members in that and just always had a lot of respect for what they did. I actually majored in risk management and insurance at Georgia, came to Gallagher at the Carolinas to start off with, found my way to Atlanta several years ago, and I’ve done a little bit of everything here. I joke with people that I’m a utility infielder, I guess. I’ve worked in a sales capacity, I’ve worked in a more technical marketing placement type of capacity, and I’ve also done some service, so this is the latest iteration of what I do here, I’m managing MGA product for Gallagher and the team here. I’m really really excited about serving URMIA, and university students.

Jenny: Terrific. It’s exciting to talk to somebody with a risk management education. I know they exist in the URMIA world, but most of our members have come apart from insurance and risk management kind of haphazardly. So, that’s terrific. Were you involved in the Honors Society in your campus at all? 

Alex: I was not, no. I wish that I could say I was that smart. The UGA honors college is a little above where I was. I was kind of lucky to get in and made the best of it. My wife, though, is a proud member of the honors college. So I’ve at least got that going in my family. Maybe my sons will turn out with some of her brains.

Jenny: No problem. Well, let me give a shout out to you, congratulations on the new baby. Tell us a little bit about that adventure last week. 

Alex: Yeah, so I guess I owe an apology to you for the scheduling in this. We’ve stopped and started a few times trying to figure out the best time to do this recording, we’ve added another son to the family last week, so I’ve got a 6 day old newborn in our house right now, along with a three-year-old whose daycare is closed, so we’ve had a lot of fun with the quarantine and working from home and so it’s been really great, I mean we’re adjusting to the lack of sleep and the things you had forgotten about from three years ago, but we’re just really grateful that baby’s happy and healthy, mom’s happy and healthy and we’re really excited about it.

Jenny: Well, again, congratulations and I mean every parent remembers those early days and I mean you sound well rested, you look great, so congratulations on that part.

Alex: Thank you. I have a very gracious wife who knew we had this going on today and was able to give me a little extra support last night. 

Jenny: So, I’ve gotten to know Alex over the last several months. I was looking in my email, also it looks like we actually, my first response from you was on February 28th, and so URMIA, and let me just give a little bit of history, our finance committee a few years back was kind if tasked with coming up with some non-dues revenue for our association, and obviously being in the insurance industry, we talk about new insurance products that we can offer to our members that are helpful and could possibly lead to some revenue for the association. So, our finance committee came up with the idea of creating a RFP for a student property insurance program, so our volunteer task force, which was led by Stacie Kroll, and it also included Courtney Davis-Curtis, Chauncey Fagler, Paul Fox and Colorado Robertson, and later on we added a couple of URMIA staff: Gary Langsdale and Lou Drapeau. So I wanted to give a shoutout to all of them for helping develop the RFP. We had to adjust it a little bit, and then just based on some feedback from the people that responded to the RFP, but we were really happy with the response we got from our affiliate members to the RFP, and in the end we were happy to award the program to Gallagher, and I’ve gotten to know Alex a lot over the last few months as we’ve developed the program and brought it online to our site, so thank you for keeping us all on time during this crazy pandemic. We were able to bring this to the members on time as we promised, and it was an ambitious schedule. Actually when  I looked back at it, I mean we had about 30 days that we asked quite a bit, to respond to the proposal and to develop the program really quickly, so kudos to you and the whole Gallagher team for getting that done.

Alex: Thank you very much. It’s been a fun process. We’ve joked that putting together the RFP response was one thing, the development of the site. It's been one of the things where we’re kind of stuck in the time warp, we were wondering was that a week ago? A month ago? When’s the next deliverable due, so we’re just excited to be able to have everything propped up on the timeline we had set out for.

Jenny: So, for all the URMIA members and others who are listening to us today, it is accessible from the URMIA site, we have an insurance menu on our website, which kind of lists our three insurance products that we offer now, and you can get to the SPIP from there, and we’ve had a couple previews of the site and I know we are featuring on the, interview with Alex in our URMIA insights newsletters, so I would encourage all of our members to check that out, but it’s a super easy, friendly program, so the staff and I did a little tutorial with Bailey last week, and shout out to Bailey for doing that and doing a great job introducing us to it. We asked a lot of typical questions, a couple of us are parents of college-aged children, so it looks like a great, great product in a way to protect people. Can we just talk a little bit about the options that you get when you go on the website? What would a typical user need to know before they looked at the site? 

Alex: Sure, so if a user navigates to the side, they’re given a very very  user-friendly process for applying, for evaluating options. We have some menu dropdowns, they just need to be able to know what school they go to, so it’s easy question number 1, what state their in, easy question number 2, it starts to get a little more nuanced when they figure out how much personal property do I have with me that I’m looking to insure, that’s a question that requires a little bit of thought. We do field a fair amount of calls to help people sort through what that looks like for them, what an appropriate limit would be, but they’re given options all the way down from a $3,000 limit at the low end up to a $15,000 limit in thousand dollar increments, so you can kind of play around with what those look like, get a quote in real time and the same with toggling deductibles. We have 25, 50, 100 dollar deductibles. Really, the student just needs to be thoughtful of what type of belongings they have with them, what type of limit they think might be appropriate. Obviously their home address, their school address, stuff like that, but it should be information that you have at the ready. 

Jenny: Yeah, and I think one of the questions we asked Bailey was if the student moves, or maybe changes residence halls, or changes apartments, the coverage follows them, correct?

Alex: Absolutely. Yes, the property coverage does. One little difference there is we do offer a SAD car personal liability product as well. That is specific to the location, but as far as the personal property coverage is concerned, it follows you everywhere, which is great. You can take the coverage home with you when you go home for spring break, winter break, it travels with you if you study abroad for some reason, which might not be as pressing of a need today, but certainly in the future, we know that that value will be back where it has been historically. It travels with you if you move, and I think the big piece of that with the environment today around the pandemic and schools may be stopping and starting or going remote, the coverage is there. If you buy the policy intending to be on campus and for some reason you end up going home and doing remote learning for a period of time or living off campus to do remote learning, the coverage does travel with you when you go there. There’s no need to go back and give us a new address for the personal property coverage- it’s going to be good with you wherever you live.  

Jenny: That’s terrific. So, I know one of the things that the task force was looking for was the ability to offer it to employees and faculty of our institutions, too. So, I wanted to make sure that we brought that up, that it is available. I remember, specifically a member of the task force was like “I want to purchase it myself” just to protect my cell phone, so I think that’s a really good example, I mean we all carry around pretty expensive smartphones and things happen. 

Alex: Things do happen, yes.

Jenny: So I wanted to make sure we highlighted that. So, the extra $100;000 that you alluded to, will you explain that again? Like how that works? 

Alex: The program really started as a personal property offering for students, that’s always been the focus of it. Over time it’s evolved a little bit. The needs that we were hearing from a lot of our customers, they wanted some sort of SAD car offering that would make the product function more like a true renter’s product, so with an HF4 renter’s policy you have a personal property side of the house as well as a personal liability side, and so what we’ve done is create a personal liability only product that’s going to function like a renter’s liability product would. It’s going to cover you for third party bodily injury as well as third party property damage that you could be held liable for as a result of your negligence, so everybody who comes to this site and evaluates personal property options after they go through the process of getting a personal property quote, will be prompted with this optional coverage to add liability as well and round out the offering making it function like a true renter’s product, and it is a coverage, a lot of times, students if they’re living off campus will have a requirement to carry some sort of liability product as a requirement of their lease that they sign with their apartment complex, and this can be used to satisfy that.

Jenny: Yeah, that’s great, great to know. I know one of the things that we talked about was how high value items like bicycles, musical instruments, can you speak to that a little bit?

Alex: Sure, so there are some typical sub limits that apply to the program. Bicycles, it’s fairly inflexible and we have a $2,000 per occurrence limit on bicycles, but we do have the ability to schedule other things, particularly high value musical instruments, jewelry. It's not always the best way to insure a high value jewelry item, but we can do it. Just at the end of the application process you’re prompted with a question of do you have any items that you’d like to schedule, if you do, it’s a pretty straightforward process. It guides you how to get the schedule, how to get to talk with our office through that and we can provide some coverage there. 

Jenny: Great, and I know Bailey talked about the most typical limits, and I think the website is even programmed to default to the one that’s the most popular. When I think about, my son is moving into his house near campus next week, and like how many belongings he is going to take, you know it’s kind of hard to think about how much that adds up, but I mean a laptop is a few thousand dollars, cellphone, worse case scenario… What do you recommend is the most typical?

Alex: So, for most of our students they end up buying somewhere in the $5,00-$7,000 range. We certainly see students buy coverage on either end of that, but I’d say the average tends to fall in the $5,000-$7,000 range. I think that that’s going to cover really what you care about most that you’re taking off to school with you, it’s the laptops, the tablets, a lot of small appliances and stuff like that, and most of the time you’re not going to run into a scenario where if you have a claim, it’s a large scale loss, most of what we see is, frankly, accidental damage to an individual’s belongings. Someone drops a cellphone and the screen cracks, someone spills coffee on a laptop and ruins the laptop. We do also cover theft and fire, so there could be events where any and everything in a dorm room is stolen or everything in the dorm room is burned up, but for the most part we’ve seen people choose that $5,00-$7,000 mark, is a good watermark. 

Jenny: Ok, and let me ask the obvious question, so I obviously have homeowners insurance in my own home, and my son is going to university, so what’s the difference between this and the coverage he would get from my homeowners.

Alex: There’s a couple of main considerations on that. That’s always the first question people ask is if I have homeowners coverage or if my parents have homeowners coverage, why would I need this, and it’s a good logical question. So, the two considerations really are first off, the majority of claims that come in are accidental damage claims. Most homeowners policies are not going to cover those types of events, so again, I dropped my cell phone, spilt liquid on my laptop, I dropped something in the toilet. We’ve had that happen a lot, shamefully, and you’re not going to see a lot of homeowners insurance policies cover those types of claims. Second is just the practicality of filing that claim through a homeowners policy. Typically, you’re going to have at a minimum $1,000 deductible typically on a homeowners policy, some much higher than that, and so you find yourself asking the question: are you going to be able to recoup much from insurance proceeds if you damage your iphone, damage your laptop, you really need to have practical deductibles that are tailored towards this type of exposures as well, so that’s where this comes in if you aim to recoup some sort of insurance proceeds through a claim for damaged property, you need to have deductibles that are in the $2500-$1500 range to really make it make logical sense.

Jenny: Yeah, and I wanted to just salute your team, I mean, who developed the website, it’s super easy to change, you know you can get a quote so quickly based on the different dollar amounts and the different dollar amounts, ti makes it super easy to see what you can afford, what your kind of threshold is, how much you really want your deductible to be, and so it’s great that you don’t have to put in much information to get that quote, so I wanted to bring that up so everybody knows how easy it is to use that site.

Alex: Thank you, that’s definitely one of the main benefits that we’re always trying to aim for is usability. 

Jenny: Yeah, I mean I think we’ve covered most things here. We talked about things that are covered, laptops, tablets, phones, textbooks, clothing, it’s all good, and that our members, our faculty and our administrative, our own members can purchase the program and everything is done through the website, right? 

Alex: Everything is done through the website. It’s quote, it’s bind, it’s policy issuance, payment all done through the website, very easy. Claims are also done through the website as well, so I think that’s really the only thing we haven’t covered is that we do handle the claims in house, we function as a MGU facility. So, if you file a claim you’re going to get a Gallagher adjuster from our team that’s going to be contacting you and working with you through that process, so really specialized and dedicated to this niche coverage.

Jenny: So, that’s all done online, right? First you have to pay with a credit card right at the time you purchase the site, or the insurance, and then you can file a claim, but it’s really important to get a police report, correct?

Alex: If there is a theft, yes., and you don’t necessarily need a police report for other types of parels, but for a theft, that is one of the pieces of required documentation. When you file the claim online, you’re going to be presented with options to describe what happened, what type of claim is it, is it a theft, is it a fire loss, is it accidental damage, and when that comes into our claims team, they’ll actually know what to contact you about, what type of information to request from you, and we’ll walk you through that process. So, even if you have a theft claim and you don’t know that you need to obtain a police report, we’ll walk you through that process pretty quickly and we really just say if you think you had a claim, go ahead and file it and we’ll help you know what types of information you need to get together.

Jenny: Gosh, that’s terrific. Well, I think I’m really excited that we’re offering this program to our members and excited to work with Alex and your team there, and looking forward to really helping our members, our members’ students and faculty and staff. I mean I think this is a great product. I mean I can’t see any reason why I myself won’t purchase it, so you’ll be seeing an application from us because I, you know, you do worry about these things and it’s just great protection and it’s very affordable. When you see the cost, you’re like wow, you know, why wouldn’t you do this, really.

Alex: Sure, we thank you for that. We’re excited about that new business Jenny, and we’re excited to work with all of the URMIA member institutions and students and we’re available here to answer any questions. I’m sure there’s a way to get our contact information out there, and we’ll be glad to field any sort of communication you have and answer any questions you have and see if this is something we can put out in front of your students.

Jenny: Awesome. Yeah, we will link to the site and to the contact information in the show notes today, so I just want to thank you again for being the guest on my program the week after you had a new baby, so thanks for that. I know it was some shuffling, but it all worked out in the end, and thanks for keeping us on time. We’re just thrilled to offer this product  to our members, so thank you Alex. 

Alex: Thank you very much, Jenny, for having me and like I said, we’re excited to serve and looking forward to everyone.

Jenny: Alright, I think that’s going to be a wrap. This is it for URMIAmatters this time.