New York
State insurance regulation is here to stay, an investment banker says.
Elizabeth Malone, a senior vice president at Wunderlich Securities Inc., Memphis, Tenn., talked about the future of the insurance regulatory sysem here this week at a conference sponsored the New York Society of Securities Analysts, New York.
Malone, who once worked for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, Kansas City, Mo., noted that many of the arguments now being made in favor of federal regulation of insurance were made in 1991.
The states and the NAIC responded by creating the risk-based capital ratio and a national insurance department accreditation program, Malone said.
The initiatives helped standardize regulation and created indicators to signal when regulators would step in to oversee troubled companies, Malone said.
Malone said she did not think the intervention levels were particularly conservative when they were established.
