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First Annual Report from NAAICA Board

First Anniversary

NAAICA is getting ready to celebrate its first anniversary. We have made a lot of progress in our first year including the following:

• Adopted a set of by-laws which require our association to be democratic and transparent.
• Hired a management company that uses the latest in technology to help us keep our operating expenses low.
• Implemented our first election in which any member had an opportunity to run for office and all members had a chance to vote for the candidate of their choice on line.
• Constructed a web-site which includes special areas for our members and a forum in which members can communicate their ideas with other members.

We have also had a few disappointments

The total numbers of active and retired agents that have joined during our first year has been just a little over 200. Although the revenue from these memberships allows us to pay our overhead, quite frankly there is very little left over to provide additional services to our members. Although we acknowledge that our very existence is a valuable service all unto itself, we were hoping to be able to do much more for our members.

The future seems to full of peril and challenges.

Competitive Products.  Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the recent conventions was there was very little emphasis placed on the need to make our core auto and fire products more competitively priced. This has been and will continue to be NAAICA’s prime concern.

Some agents removed from statefarm .com.  Some of you might be aware of a recent incident which may be an indication of things to come.  Just a few days ago many agents discovered their agency information had been completely removed from the official State Farm web-site. This meant if a policy holder attempted to find the agent’s address or phone number on-line, they would not have been able to do so.

Certain classes of agents singled out. Although the removal of any agent from the company web-site would be a problem, what was of even a greater concern is those agents who had their information removed from statefarm.com appear to be either agents who did not sign the contract amendment AMD 66 which allows agents to receive policies sold over the Internet by the company, or agents who had not signed up to participate in CRC. After many complaints all of the agents were restored to the web-site the following day.

Questions about the removal of agents from statefarm.com remain.

If agents had been omitted randomly from the web-site it would be easy to accept the explanation of some kind of technical error. But since it appears only those agents who had chosen not to participate in certain company programs were eliminated, one must ask at least three important questions:

• What was really going on behind the scenes that caused the elimination of these agents from the web-site in the first place? Was this something planned by the company all along but was somehow implemented prematurely?

• Are there additional plans to someday remove certain classes of agents from the official company web-site? Would it be possible for non-select agents to come to the office one morning and discover they were no longer on the web-site because they had chosen not to participate in the Select Agent program?

• Should this happen again as part of a deliberate attempt to limit the opportunities of some agents who have for what ever reason chosen not to participate in certain company programs, who is going to challenge the company on such decisions? It is very doubtful any one agent could ever afford to do so on there own.

Our future is up to our members.

The very fact that NAAICA exists at all forces company management to consider the consequences of some of their actions before their final implementation. Should the company make decisions that limit the ability of all or even some agents to manage their agencies within the scope of their company agreements then how will most of those agents be able to respond to those efforts all by themselves?

NAAICA is prepared to help defend the terms of any of the many agent agreements. But we must also be realistic. Over the next few weeks the NAAICA Board will be meeting to determine our future. At the heart of our discussions will be whether we believe we will be able to obtain a sufficient number of new members in the coming year to continue to move forward.

Should we conclude that a sufficient number of agents have decided not to participate then we may have no other choice than to at least suspend our efforts or maybe even disband altogether.

For now we are willing to wait a while longer to see what happens. During this time your input will be very welcome. Please contact any one of our Board members to let us know what you believe our future direction should be.

Tony Crisafulli           tony@naaica.org
Bud Kaczor               bud@naaica.org
Joe Kelly                   joe@naaica.org
Steve Knapp             steve@naaica.org
Jack Rees                 jack@naaica.org
Jim Wallace               jim@naaica.org
Michelle Yates            michelle@naaica.org

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