Rancho Mesa’s Surety Relationship Executive Anne Wright sat down with Mike Hall, Vice President of Surety for Philadelphia Insurance Company to explore what makes Philadelphia Surety unique and the programs they offer businesses placed with them.

Transcript

Anne Wright: Welcome. This is Anna Wright, Surety Account Executive here with Rancho Mesa Insurance and we’re going to talk a little bit about how we place business with our surety companies. We have a lot of options. Our clients rely on us to obviously be the professionals they expect handling their business, but also making sure we get the right surety relationship that's going to serve them best with all the terms, conditions and long term relationship.

So I have Mike Hall here with me today. Mike, you want to do a quick introduction?

Mike Hall: Sure. Hi, my name is Mike Hall with Philadelphia Insurance, Vice president and I run the Western region, which includes the northwest, Northern California, Southern California and Hawaii. I’ve been doing surety for 29 years, and Anne and I have known each other for, I would say, probably 27 years of that. So we've been doing business a long time and I'm happy to be here.

AW: Well, thank you for being here. We appreciate it. So when we are looking at placing a piece of business with a surety, you know, we're looking at the type of contractor developer, the type of work they do, the job sizes they need, who they do work for, and then the various underwriting information that they have that's available. So again, we have lots of choices in lots of markets, but we found Philadelphia to be a very strong market for some of our best clients, for many years. I think Philly's been around for 11 years.

MH: Philly Surety has been around for just over 12 and a half years. And then Philadelphia Insurance itself has been around for 60 plus years.

AW: Okay. So they brought in some great talent with Mike and some of his peers to run the surety division. It's been very successful. So we found it a very good market for a lot of our accounts. With regard to Philly, what we find sets you apart from some other sureties, again, the relationships. It's very important that we have the personal relationships with the underwriter. So when you say we've been working together and known each other for 27 years, that matters, obviously. What do you think sets Philly apart from some of your competitors?

MH: I would say one thing that sets us apart is we're A++ 15 ranked by AM Best. That's the highest ranking you can get. There are other sureties, but there's only a handful of them that get that ranking. I think we provide good service and a consistent underwriting approach. So the broker in the account knows exactly what to expect as we're going through the underwriting process.

AW: Yeah, it's an excellent point. Something we have to take into consideration with a lot of public agencies and general contractors, the AM Best rating is an important tool that they use to determine what's acceptable as a surety company. So there's a lot of A- surety companies out there right now, which is still an A, and it's still you know, it's not a big negative. But to be able to say you've got that A++ 15 rating is definitely huge for you all.

MH: It definitely comes into play on the commercial side of the house when they're looking at large appeal bonds or bonds of that nature.

AW: Gotcha. Okay. Yeah, well, you know, some of the smaller to midsize accounts, though, you know you write those, too. So I would typically think that the very large general contractors or developers are going to need that A++ 15 rating. But it's nice to know that Philly is available for some of other accounts that we've been able to place with you along the way. So it's not just meant for mega companies.

MH: Exactly.

AW: And you also have a small contract program. You are one of the early entrants, I think, into the, what we call, the Express program.

MH: Yes, we have on the contract side, we have it's called just Contract Express, and it's for programs of job sizes, $500,000 single up to $1,000,000 aggregate programs. We can go a little bit larger in that area, but that's just kind of typically where they, where they operate. And then on the commercial side, we have Commercial Express, which handles those small statutory bonds.

The agent or even the account itself can go online and purchase a bond there, prints it out, prints out the bond form for you and you ready to go.

AW: Very efficient.

MH: Yeah, it's very efficient. And then standard contract, we go up to programs of $300 million. There's other competitors of ours out there that do substantially more than that but-

AW: It fits your needs.

MH: Yep.

AW: So, very good. We look at claims handling as being an important part of the surety relationship as well. We, obviously we all underwrite to avoid claims. We underwrite to a zero loss ratio, but claims happen. So do you have anything you can share about your claims people and how well they work to resolve issues?

MH: Yeah, our claims department is great and in addition to just the normal claims handler, we have one local here in Southern California, but we also have an engineer on staff. So if you had a situation where there's maybe a big bid spread and our account was confident in their number, we could have the engineer talk with the account, go through the project, walk through it, get a better understanding, and then they'll just provide that additional feedback to the underwriting team.

And then we make the final decision on whether we write the final bond or not. We also have accountants on staff, so if the account is in difficult situation, we can send the accountant in and go through the books and records, get a better assessment of kind of what's going on. You know, that makes sense to finance the account through the project, or is it better to take, you know, some other approach to resolving the claims situation.

AW: Sure. So value added services that exactly through the project.

MH: Exactly, and we also offer up early on in the underwriting process, we have the ability to take collateral. We can also use funds control to maybe get over some hurdles in the underwriting process.

AW: All right. So again, all the tools, that's wonderful. Well, I know there was a recent newsletter that came out from Philly and they talked about selecting the right relationship and they mentioned reputation, size and service. And again, that's what our clients look for in us, and that's what we look for in our sureties, and Philly certainly fits the bill when it comes to reputation and size of the company and service to us as the agents and then our clients to get them on their way and grow the relationship and grow their business. And again, the value that you bring has been a great experience in my career with you. So, thank you for that.

MH: Likewise.

AW: So as a broker, we're going to find any way, any reasonable way, to get the bond done. If we can do it with Philly, we're going to do it with Philly. Mike is one of our go-to’s and we appreciate you being here today in StudioOne™.

MH: Thank you for having me.

AW: You're welcome. If anyone has any questions, you can contact me awright@ranchomesa.com.

Thank you.

MH: Thank you.