FACI Meeting Sets Sail Aug. 6 on International Issues

The FACI, which is comprised of major insurance industry participants and academics, consumer advocates and state regulators, in addition to McRaith, and is chaired by Brian Duperreault, president and CEO, Marsh & McLennan Companies, created two subcommittees, who are due to deliver on any progress. They are "affordability and accessibility of insurance," whose report will be presented by William P. White, commissioner of Washington, D.C.'s Department of Insurance, Securities and Banking, and "international regulatory balance," to be presented by John Degnan, senior advisor to the CEO, The CHUBB Corp.

Affordability and Accessibility of Insurance Committee members are:

Birny Birnbaum, a consumer advocate, consulting economist and director of the Center for Economic Justice; Virginia Insurance Commissioner Jacqueline K. Cunningham; Loretta Fuller, CEO of Insurance Solutions Associates Inc.; Nevada Insurance Commissioner Scott Kipper; Christopher Mansfield, senior vice president and general counsel of Liberty Mutual Group; and Washington, D.C.'s  White.

International Regulatory Balance Committee members are:

Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner Michael Consedine, New York Life Insurance CFO Michael E. Sproule, Chubb's Degnan; New York Department of Financial Services Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky; Scott E. Harrington, of the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania and a scholar for health policy at the American Enterprise Institute; Connecticut Insurance Commissioner Tom Leonardi, Monica Lindeen, Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance and State Auditor; and Sean McGovern, a director and general counsel of Lloyd's North America, who is the international representative on the panel.

Duperreault will be an ex-officio member of each. The committees met by phone in July for an organizational meeting for both Subcommittees but haven't done lots of work, according to sources. 

At the inaugural meeting in March, McRaith showed that the scope of his grasp of insurance regulatory matters reaches far beyond any of the participants' specific issues, as they were all representing their constituency's interests. McRaith was able to turn the meeting's direction on its head by bringing the focus to the demographics issue, and away from the pet issues of many of those on the FACI, such as international regulatory hurdles for larger insurers or aligning global systematically important financial institutions' (G-SIFI) capital requirements with domestic SIFI requirements. However, with the IAIS and the U.S. criteria now released for identifying these SIFIs, there may be a more robust discussion of these issues now. 

The much-awaited FIO report on modernizing the insurance industry, though, has not yet been released, more than seven months after a Dodd-Frank statutory deadline, with suggestions that is caught up in inter and intra-agency bureaucracy.