New York Asks Life Insurers for Disaster Plan Updates

What You Need to Know

Carriers are supposed to send in their updated disaster response plans and business continuity plans by Oct. 7.
The questionnaires could help agents and advisors anywhere in the world understand how big financial services companies try to plan for disasters.
They also offer insight into how carriers’ communication strategies during a natural disaster.

The New York State Department of Financial Services has sent life insurers, retirement systems, health insurers and other life and health coverage providers a request for their new disaster response plans.

Carriers are supposed to send in their updated disaster response plans and business continuity plans by Oct. 7.

The new instructions, given in Insurance Circular Letter Number 11 (2022), are similar to the instructions given in 2021.

The department notes, for example, that it might need 7-day-per-week access to an insurer’s disaster liaison after an especially big disaster, and that, in some cases, the department might ask a big insurer’s disaster liaison to come to emergency response office in Albany, New York City or other, alternative location, and, possibly, to work in the emergency response office seven days per week.

The instructions come with a link to questionnaires that could help agents and advisors anywhere in the world understand how big financial services companies try to plan for disasters, and what they can do to try to harden their own practices against floods, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes and other types of disasters.

What It Means

Part of helping clients manage financial risk depends on your practice managing disaster risk.

Before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the New York City World Trade Center, the need for detailed disaster prep plans might have seemed somewhat far-fetched.

Since that date, New York has experienced severe flooding due to Superstorm Sandy, which hit in 2012, and the COVID-19 pandemic.