SNC Spotlight

Insurance can be complex. Turn to our blog for up-to-date, relevant content to help you make the best decisions for your financial institution. With expert knowledge from seasoned industry professionals, we simplify insurance topics so you can get back to business.
All Posts

How State National's Unique Service Model Offers More Benefits to You

The Difference Is in the Details: State National’s Dedicated & Proactive Relationship Service Model

 

There is no question that at State National we offer more than just a solution to protect your portfolio — we strive to build lasting, long-term relationships based on trust, transparency, and dedicated service. Here are just a few of the reasons why we are able to deliver more for our partners.

Dedicated Teams, Dedicated Service

Delivering an effective program from day one is what builds the strong foundation of partnership. Service is at the core of everything State National does, and one of the ways we reiterate this core value is by separating our sales and service staff into separate teams. Why is this important? We have found that it is the best way to guarantee best-in-class service before, during, and long after implementation. Through this one-of-a-kind industry model, both sales and service can complement each other’s skills to act in the best interests of our partners.

COMMITMENT, AGREEMENT, INTEGRITY, SUPPORT and TRUSTA Better Build Based on Collaboration

Understanding the sales process and carrying out a seamless implementation strategy is paramount in starting your program off on the right foot. As with other providers, you work with the sales team during the selection process. We rigorously train our sales staff to understand your needs and ensure you’re choosing a product that best suits your specific situation.

Unlike other providers in our industry, however, before implementation you’ll be assigned a dedicated State National service team that specializes in seamless integration of your program into your business. They know every in-and-out of the implementation process, and work tirelessly to understand each client’s particular needs and assist in providing a custom solution.

Your Client Executive and Account Team

State National is the only provider with dedicated Client Executives who work only on portfolio tracking and protection. As the highly trained and experienced implementation team works to get your program up and running seamlessly, you’ll also work closely with your Client Executive as they get to know you and your organization’s unique needs.

SN Program Implementation Image_11-27-19

After implementation is complete, your Client Executive will offer continuous monitoring, personalized support, and consistent stewardship of your program. Their job and sole focus is to ensure you are fully satisfied and that your program is delivering results based on your objectives.

Your Client Executive is backed up by a dedicated Account Team assigned to your program. You never have to worry about emails that take days to return or questions that go unanswered — your Account Team is knowledgeable about the details of your specific program and is always available to assist with monitoring, tracking, and support.

This kind of dedicated and committed support provides a better experience for you and your staff — which ultimately translates into a better experience for your borrowers. (How? Stay tuned to this blog for a future update on why this is so!)

Transparency, Transparency, Transparency

One of the ways we measure our performance and success as a company is by the quality of the relationships our Client Executives have with the credit unions, banks, and finance companies they serve. For example, in addition to regular program updates, each year every client receives a personalized and personally delivered Annual Impact Report (AIR). This detailed executive review shows your institution exactly what the value of your State National program is to your organization. It includes intricate details, benchmarks, and recommendations. Clients can see the fluctuations and movements between loan volume, premium production, claims, and much more.

We believe that the information we have, you should also have, and that you should never be in the dark about how your program is performing. We can’t say it enough: Transparency and trust are key to building lasting, mutually beneficial relationships.

“Always Inspect What You Expect”

We conduct multiple client surveys on different aspects of service delivery:

  • During implementation
  • Post-implementation
  • Ongoing contact center KPIs
  • Borrower experience
  • Annual overall satisfaction

Collecting these metrics helps us to test the success of program implementation, maintenance, and performance. We want to make sure we are consistently improving and living up to the high standards we have set for ourselves. You cannot deliver consistent superior results year after year and decade after decade if you're skimping in any of these areas.

“Always inspect what you expect,” as the saying goes, and we live by it. Our focus as your partner is to be an extension of your organization, and we cannot do that if we are not aligned, which is why we invest significantly in measuring what you want and need and how we can continually improve to deliver that and more.

Portfolio Protection Is Our Singular Obsession

 

State National was one of the pioneers of collateral protection insurance and we’ve been the experts on it for nearly 50 years. Our focus is always to provide the absolute best in portfolio protection and is never diverted by trying to persuade you to add additional products or services. It’s not that these ancillary products are not available, it’s that CPI is a risk mitigation product, and shouldn’t be viewed a fee or revenue generating product. It’s about mitigating risk from lending and reducing charge-offs to protect net income.

When services are bundled together, it can be easy to play a shell game among products, seemingly offsetting the costs of one element by shifting it to another. State National’s goal is always to ensure that your CPI program is successful and cost-effective on its own merits and is delivering consistent loss ratios and dependable long-term value to your organization.

We Are the Insurer (and Yes, That Matters a Lot)

Because State National is not just the tracking and insurance provider but also the insurance company, we can offer a level of underwriting flexibility and customization unmatched by anyone else in the industry. We look at each of our business partners individually, and base program details and pricing specifically for each institution. When performance is pooled in a CPI program, some lenders have to subsidize the results of non-performers, and that is not an effective way to build relationships for the long haul.

NewsImage-AMBest-2

We Learn With Our Partners to Help Us All Grow

With service as a core value, State National not only puts maximum effort into providing the best portfolio protection anywhere, we also actively look for ways to help move the industry needle and be a part of a larger mission. This includes actively seeking to expose our clients to opportunities with leading organizations that explore innovative, forward-thinking ideas. Our partnerships with thought leaders such as Filene Research Institute (including being part of Filene's "Inner Circle" by sponsoring Filene’s Center of Excellence for Emerging Technologies and Center of Excellence for Innovation & Incubation), CUES, and others are added resources that can provide support to our clients and the industry overall.

And we don’t just stop at data introduction and access. The State National Client Advisory Council (CAC) provides a forum for credit union and other financial executives, along with leaders from State National, to collaborate, share ideas on important industry topics, and conduct real-world problem solving for current challenges. We want these leaders to engage with us and one another while we all search for viable industry solutions and opportunities. Our CAC members meet quarterly and work to develop and produce solutions that are then made available to our council members and to our other clients across the country.

The Proof Is in the Results

Best in ClassWe are always looking for ways to invest in and maximize the use of resources for our partners. State National has a corporate culture of unparalleled service and commitment, and that’s not just something we say — we see proof of this in our stellar Net Promoter Score (NPS), which has consistently scored at more than double the industry average and is higher than some of the best-known service companies out there, such as USAA, Apple, and American Express.

View Our Latest NPS Score!

Is this the kind of service and dedication your organization is looking for from your portfolio protection provider? We look forward to starting a conversation with you and answering why you and your organization should be partnering with State National.

Stay tuned to our blog for a future update about how your provider’s service delivery model and expectations can have a big impact on your borrowers’ experience.

 

Jeremy Clark
Jeremy Clark
State National Sr. Director of Client Service Jeremy Clark leads State National's Client Executive Group to facilitate client support, satisfaction, and retention.

Related Posts

Embracing Equity on International Women’s Day 2023

Celebrating women’s achievements, forging women’s empowerment, and building workplaces where women thrive.

Tackling Inflation and the Automobile Industry: A Simple Solution to Reduce Future Auto Loan Charge-offs

Despite Inflation, You Can Still Maintain a Competitive Advantage and Protect Your Auto Loan Portfolio   Spotlight Soundbite: The Value of Customized Portfolio Protection in the Subprime Auto Loan Market     Borrowers Are Facing Financial Stress The government’s stimulus checks have long run out, as have the grace periods many financial institutions implemented during the pandemic. Interest rates have soared and prices have inflated. Individuals have returned to work and are again bearing the costs of gas, transportation, and childcare. While cheery, the holiday season may be met equally with foreboding for some as they contemplate how to balance their checkbooks with the looming expectation of events and gifts on top of already heightened regular expenses. While buy now and pay later programs may offer temporary relief, borrowers will ultimately not be able to put off making tough decisions about where to spend and save. Unfortunately, a growing number of auto loan borrowers, and especially subprime borrowers, are choosing to drop or reduce their auto insurance coverage as a result of having to decide which bills to pay with their increasingly stretched paychecks. And these uninsured or underinsured borrowers pose a threat to your institution’s loan portfolio and profitability. The news isn’t all grim, however — State National can help protect your financial institution from the risks posed by this group. How to Minimize Charge-offs Caused by Uninsured Borrowers Do you currently use an insurance tracking system to keep track of your borrowers’ coverage status in an attempt to prevent charge-offs? It’s a good start — tracking is a critical part of monitoring your institution’s risk exposure. However, having your staff track insurance in-house is a time-consuming and inefficient solution. More concerning, even if you employ an outside vendor to track coverage for you, studies show that tracking alone is not enough to encourage borrowers to keep their insurance in force. Without a consequence for remaining uninsured or underinsured, it’s been shown time and time again that a significant portion of borrowers, particularly in the low prime and subprime space, simply will not heed warnings to bring their loans into compliance no matter how many letters or phone calls they get reminding them to do so. Without a mechanism that will actually change borrower behavior, tracking alone still leaves too much risk in your portfolio. A Persistent Problem — With an InsurTech Solution The good news is, you can more thoroughly protect your portfolio while also saving labor costs and freeing up your staff to perform other tasks to grow your business. And you can do it all easily, seamlessly, and with total peace of mind when it comes to compliance. Protecting collateral from loss is most definitely not the same as it was “in the old days” — or even just a few years ago. Advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other leading-edge technology solutions have changed the game when it comes to mitigating the risk from uninsured borrowers. From software bots that can log in to insurer websites and update thousands of insurance statuses in seconds to nearly effortless multichannel borrower submission options including QR codes, email, text, web, and more, collateral protection problems of the past are simply not an issue today, especially with State National as your provider. As I like to say, “This isn’t your grandpa's CPI!”     Save Time, Money, and Aggravation — What’s Not to Like? State National’s solutions provide tracking AND protect your portfolio. We also save your financial institution time with seamless implementation and multi-option borrower insurance submission solutions. Even better, there’s InsurTrak – our custom-designed proprietary technology platform where you can view all program details in real time with just a few clicks. Additionally, you can personalize your coverage around exactly what works best for your business. Whether you need you need a full-featured, comprehensive program, one that keeps costs at a minimum for borrowers, or something in between, State National can customize a program that best fits your needs.   A Simple Solution for Reduced Risk and Increased Profitability We have heard from some financial institutions that they “have no charge-offs” because they planned and allotted for a certain amount of loss. But money lost is still money lost even if you budgeted for it! What if you could save your company hundreds of thousands of dollars this year? Well, you can! Let me show you how you can leverage State National’s advanced technology and 50 years of experience mitigating loss from uninsured borrowers to proactively protect your business against today’s unpredictable economy and the wave of charge-offs your financial institution may be facing soon. It’s not too late to protect your portfolio from what’s coming our way.  

Amazing Things Happen When Female Executives Get Together

State National's Retreat Where Female Finance Executives Go to Network and Learn A 2021 report from CUNA indicated that 51% of CEOs at credit unions and 33% of credit union board members are female. Many organizations speak at length about the value of empowering and providing opportunities to women — yet this recognition must be met with action. For example, Kim Sponem, CEO of Summit Credit Union, took action by starting The Red Shoes initiative. Filene Research Institute actively creates research reports about women in credit union leadership. These are just two of many examples across the credit union industry. Missions like these are an important part of transforming the narrative of women and finance. State National Companies also recognizes the unique leadership traits and skillsets that female leaders bring to the financial services industry. To celebrate those traits and provide women leaders from across the country the opportunity to build relationships with their peers, we created our own initiative — an annual event called the Female Executive Networking (FEN) Retreat.   Why a Retreat Specifically for Female Executives? The goal of this annual retreat is multifold: Provide valuable, meaningful, and actionable education, information, and resources to senior credit unions and financial institutions executives that they can use to move their organizations forward. Create a forum for financial institution leaders from across the country to share best practices regarding leadership, retention, business growth, and operational excellence. Provide a rich and rewarding experience that organically allows connections and relationships to grow. Empower and inspire attendees to return to their financial institutions re-energized, with new ideas for accelerating the growth of their organizations. With these goals in mind, we launched our first FEN retreat in early 2020. And, oh, how critical it was for the female leaders who participated in this first event to achieve these goals — because at the time we didn’t realize were heading home to nearly two years of quarantine and isolation! A Most Welcome Return In 2021, after waiting 18 months from our launch date, we were more than eager to resume some sense of normalcy and held our second FEN Retreat. That year’s event featured Terri Trespicio, speaker, coach, and best-selling author of Unfollow Your Passion, as our keynote speaker and workshop leader. This year, our 2022 keynote workshop, titled How Macroeconomic Conditions Will Affect Your Financial Institution, Your Customers, and Your Household, was led by Marlena Lee, Ph.D., Global Head of Investment Solutions at Dimensional Fund Advisors, and Mary Ellen Krueger, Director, Wealth Management and Partner at Aspiriant. Not only are these FEN retreats educational, inspirational, and just plain fun, we at State National are also proud of being a part of the movement to empower even more women to lead in moving the credit union mission forward. After all, studies show that more female executives in a C-suite role can improve both customer orientation and financial performance. That’s a win-win-win — for credit unions, for their members, and for women in financial leadership. If you are interested in learning more about State National’s Female Executive Networking retreat, please contact your State National Client Executive or Regional Vice President.   Comments from FEN attendees: