insurance and business

The financial shock of adding a teenager to a family  auto insurance  policy is getting less shocking — at least somewhat. An  annual analysis by insuranceQuotes.com , a rate comparison site, found that adding a teenager still increased annual premiums substantially, but the magnitude of the increase has been falling over the past few years. Adding a single teenager to a policy caused annual premiums to increase an average of 78 percent, or $671. But rate increases have been decreasing since 2013, when the average increase was 85 percent. Laura Adams, senior  insurance  analyst with insuranceQuotes, said that factors in the trend may include safer automobile technology, a dip in the number of teenagers getting driver’s licenses and the continued impact of “graduated” driving programs, which place restrictions on new drivers until they gain more experience on the road. But the impact of adding teenagers to a policy is still a jolt to families, especial...

Wells Fargo , the scandal-plagued bank, is facing new regulatory scrutiny for not refunding insurance money owed to people who paid off their car loans early, according to people briefed on the inquiry. Just last month Wells Fargo was found to have forced unneeded collision insurance on consumers who financed their car purchases. That practice,  first disclosed by The New York Times , affected 800,000 customers according to an analysis commissioned by the bank. Some 274,000 people were pushed into delinquency as a result, and 25,000 cars were wrongly repossessed. The latest inquiry, by officials at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, where the bank has its headquarters, involves a different, specialized type of insurance that is sold to consumers when they buy a car. Called guaranteed auto protection insurance, or GAP, it is intended to protect a lender against the fact that a car — the collateral for its loan — loses significant value the moment it is driven off the ...

Auto insurers were already bracing for another bad year when the downpour started in Texas, producing potentially hundreds of thousands of new claims. “We do know that approximately 100,000 claims have come in” as of Thursday, said Matt Stillwell, manager of governmental and regulatory communications at the Insurance Council of Texas, a trade association. He said the number was expected to climb as high as 500,000. “It is looking to be a huge impact on the auto insurance market,” he said. While homeowners’ insurance policies almost always exclude flood damage, comprehensive auto policies do cover flooding. The typical household in Houston has two cars, and Mayor Sylvester Turner urged residents to “hunker down” as  Hurricane Harvey  made landfall, hoping to avoid a replay of the tie-ups and crashes that killed about 100 people fleeing Hurricane Rita in 2005. That means few people moved their cars out of harm’s way before the flooding started. Texas drivers are not req...