Farmers Chooses MSB Cost Information for Claims Initiative

MILWAUKEE, Nov. 10, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Farmers Insurance (Farmers®), the third largest personal lines property and casualty insurer in the U.S., has chosen Marshall & Swift/Boeckh (MSB), an MDA company, to provide cost information for estimating property claims.  "The accuracy and completeness of the MSB data coupled with the ease of use tailored by the MSB staff proved this to be the natural choice for our business to prepare for the next evolution of the claims landscape," said Claims Senior Vice President James Daues.  

The implementation will commence immediately, pioneered by Farmers Specialty - Farmers' market leading auxiliary products subsidiary.  Rollout plans include immediate deployment benefiting all of Farmers Specialty's core clients.  

"This project signifies a bellwether change in the property insurance market.  The traditional methodologies are now out of date.  The concept of combining state of the art research with intelligent data regardless of format is most decidedly the future," according to Jonathan Kost, MSB's Senior Vice President of Claims.  

For more than 80 years, MSB has functioned as the primary cost information source to property insurers, supplying cost data and the associated estimating technologies to meet property insurers' underwriting and claims valuation needs.  MSB has been a reliable source of detailed and localized building cost data to Farmers for many years on the underwriting side.  Now the expanding usage will include property claims settlement and replace other methodologies.

Kost indicated that MSB is uniquely qualified to service Farmers because of MSB's sophisticated data collection and validation processes.  "MSB serves all of the markets requiring cost information in both the public and private sectors with tens of thousands of users in all sectors managing partial loss estimates nationwide," said Kost.

The announcement of this agreement adds another top 10 property writer to the MSB family of users and further solidifies the interaction between claims and underwriting activity within the property insurance space.

About Marshall & Swift/Boeckh

Marshall & Swift / Boeckh (MSB) is the leading supplier of local building cost information as well as residential and commercial property valuation technology and services in the United States and Canada.  Services include MSB's InFocus Analytics, business intelligence, and industry leading "outsourcing" solutions.   MSB has five offices throughout the U.S. and Canada.

SOURCE Marshall & Swift/Boeckh