Diminishing abilities of insurance companies

Sometimes it makes sense for insurance companies to say “no thank you” to a potential customer.  Some factors relate directly to the expectation of losses where it’d no longer help the insurance company keep rates competitive for the rest of us.  Taking on as a customer someone who doesn’t care about safety and has 10 speeding tickets and prior accidents to prove it might be a good one to not insure, for example.

But I’ve got to say that it seems more and more that unless the black boxes and algorithms that drive insurance quoting and qualifying these days approve you automatically, your chance of getting an insurance company to provide you with what you need is diminishing.  Rapidly.  There used to be an old-time partnership between the agent and the insurance company where out-of-norm issues could be resolved with a discussion, a weighing of options, and sometimes a negotiation.  We wonder if those days are done.

And while this automation is awesome for many situations (thank goodness) every single day  we find families who need something that falls outside of what some programmers can design.  And every single day we find it harder and harder to have common sense discussions with common sense people with the authority to make decisions that lead to providing an important financial product to a family in need.