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August 07, 2011 at 08:00 PM
An executive at Unum Group Corp. says the company is glad it has tried to take a disciplined approach to selling group disability insurance in the past few years.
Unum, Chattanooga, Tenn. (NYSE:UNM), suffered through a number of difficult years after it went through a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the mid-1990s.
Since then, the company has emphasized that it would rather lose group disability insurance sales then set prices too low.
The company’s strategy came up recently during the company’s second-quarter earnings call.
Several competitors have reported seeing a noticeable increase in group disability claims costs in recent months; others have reported flat profit margins or wider profit margins.
At Unum US, the company’s U.S. operating division, the incidence of new claims was up slightly, but an increase in claim recoveries helped reduce the benefits ratio to 84.4% of premiums in the latest quarter, from 84.6% in the second quarter of 2010.
