Two and a half years ago, United Heritage Property & Casualty Company (UHPC) and Sublimity Insurance Company (SIC) administratively combined operations as the first step in a planned, long-term journey to achieve operational efficiencies and reduce overlap with our staff and our product offerings. Our ultimate goal was, and still remains, to realign our companies to create complimentary products and market segments as we prepare for the implementation of a modern policy administration system. We are one business operating with two companies and we are committed to the personal lines business and serving our agents and policyholders with an outstanding customer experience, adding new products and using modern technology to create efficiencies.
Our commitments to you and our policyholders remain steadfast. At the same time, we are facing unprecedented challenges within the property and casualty environment. High inflation, challenging and costly reinsurance, labor and supply chain problems, increasing costs of both property and auto claims, social inflation, and several other factors have caused many carriers to take extraordinary measures to return to profitability. We are keenly aware of these challenges as we navigate adapting our operations to mitigate risk while serving our customers better. Accordingly, we are accelerating our realignment and making strategic changes now, not waiting for longer-term industry and economic changes.
With careful consideration given to our future business alignment plans, our commitment to our agencies and policyholders, and the current environment, we are moving forward with the next steps in our alignment strategy.
- Effective today, SIC will focus on preferred personal lines products, which include Auto, Home, and Personal Umbrella. A new business moratorium for SIC Farmowner will be effective immediately as we evaluate this product in conjunction within our new system.
- The SIC Homeowner product will soon offer Service Line, Equipment Breakdown, and Personal Cyber endorsements through our partnership with Hartford Steam Boiler; more details to come before year-end.
- We are also excited about a new Commercial Business Owners Policy (BOP) product that is planned in the future with a new modern policy administration system.
- UHPC will focus on selected “specialty” products which include Home & Family (H&F), Landlord (LIP), Business (BIP), and Mobile home (MIP) programs.
- Accordingly, binding authority for UHPC will stop for new Homeowner, Auto, Farmowner, and Umbrella policies effective immediately on 10-24-2023. All existing UHPC policies in these same products will begin non-renewing on 2-1-2024, except for auto in Idaho where we will adhere to the applicable non-renewal restrictions.
We are in the personal lines business and with SIC’s standardized personal lines forms and products, we plan to grow our preferred personal lines business with SIC and continue with our specialty products with UHPC. If your agency currently represents SIC, we encourage you to remarket your qualifying UHPC clients as well as new business with SIC. To support the migration of qualifying policies from UHPC, we are revising our agency contract to combine the agency’s results from both companies for profit sharing and performance plus purposes beginning in 2024. Additional details will follow. In the coming months we will also establish an agency advisory board to formalize a communication flow with our agency partners as we continue to enhance our service and systems, as well as develop and introduce new products.
In addition to this business realignment, we will expedite the implementation of a modern policy administration system starting in 2024 with a highly respected vendor. The realignment of our businesses, products and structure combined with a modern policy administration system will increase operational efficiencies and ultimately improve our underwriting results. We will be diligent in maintaining our financial strength to meet the needs of our customers. Our parent company, United Heritage Financial Group (UHFG), has and will support our technology transformation.
These changes are necessary as we create the operating and structural changes required to mitigate risk, reduce reinsurance exposure, improve financial strength, and implement systems that allow us to remain a strong and effective partner that protects our customers for years to come. We realize this transition will have an impact on your agency; however, these strategic actions are necessary for our organization to fulfill our commitment to you and our policyholders. As we reach each milestone in this journey, we understand you may have questions surrounding the details and mechanics of our future state. In anticipation of those questions, we have included a list of FAQs along with this announcement.
Our companies have served our clients for over 115 years, and we are excited about what the future holds as our business adapts to the environment and prepares for an evolving insurance industry for the next century. We truly appreciate our partnership with you and our passion, energy, finances, new systems, and strategic actions are concentrated on creating a stronger business to serve you and our clients.
Todd Gill, CPA Fritz Chlanda, CPCU, AIM Mike Joy
President & CEO VP, Underwriting Operations VP, Marketing