Theresa A. Reardon
Title: Executive Director, Massachusetts Financial Services Industry Agency Inc.
Age: 48
Experience: 19 years
Theresa Reardon got her start in the insurance industry nearly 20 years ago as an underwriter for a smaller agency, writing specialty programs for lawyers, accountants and real estate agents. From there, she skipped about Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and most recently wound up at a startup brokerage firm out of Maynard. Around the time she and her business partners realized their concept wasn’t going to catch on, she caught up with an old friend, who put her in touch with the Massachusetts Bankers Association. Reardon has been running the organization’s insurance agency for just over a year now.
Q: You mentioned bank card protection insurance is one of your newer products. Have you seen that gaining in popularity in the wake of high-profile data breaches?
A: I believe it’s gaining traction. [Banks] don’t all have it and it is something that I like to market to people because it is something that could help them. Some banks now currently feel like, “We can self-insure that, because all of our systems and procedures are in place, we have the ability to set our limits so it’s not going to be cost-effective for us to buy the insurance when we could just self-insure it.”
However, that was before 2014, and this slew of breaches. Now we have banks thinking, “That’s a lot of self-insurance for four or five hits. That’s a lot of money the bank is putting out there when perhaps all I could be responsible for is a deductible.” People are starting to think more about, “Maybe we should check this product out.” The product’s been around for a while, it just hasn’t come to light as much because some of the smaller breaches, they weren’t as public and they weren’t as severe.
It’s starting to gain popularity and speed right now because of everything that happened last year. I wouldn’t say it’s fast growing, but it’s starting to get a lot more notice than it did before.
Q: What else is hot right now in the world of bank insurance?
A: Internet banking and cyber insurance is very hot as well, as you might imagine. Every bank will have that because every bank has a website now and every bank has online banking. Everybody is going to have that, just by nature of the business.
As an agency, what we do is, we’re out looking at what are the exposures, what is everybody’s policy, do we have enough there? Do we need to make sure the insurance covers x, y and z, where [right now] it only covers x and y?
We’re constantly reviewing that particular product in light of what’s going on right now. Right now the industry’s pretty stable in terms of coverage and what’s adequate, but that can change in a heartbeat based on what’s going on.
Q: What kind of challenges did you face, personally, coming into this role?
A: In the beginning, I had an objective to bring in a little bit of technology. Not too many changes at once, but over time we’ll make those changes as we need them. The agency, when I came into it, it didn’t have a lot of technology going on. As you can see, we have a lot of file cabinets. We’re not paperless. I’m used to paperless.
My number two challenge was really to get out and meet the clients. The person who was in this role before had been in this agency for a long time, over 20 years. Now you have this younger person, they don’t know me from anyone and, in the insurance industry, it’s all relationship-based. So my biggest fear was, how are the clients going to perceive that? Are they going to be okay with that? So what we did was, [my predecessor] stayed with us through 2014 to help us make that transition.
That was the biggest challenge, getting the people to be comfortable with a new person. And as it is in anything, it’s just getting comfortable. It worked out very nicely. There are still some banks I haven’t met yet because a lot of our policies are written on three-year terms. My goal for 2015 is to get in mid-term and get to know the rest of them.
The Massachusetts Financial Services Insurance Agency’s Top Five Insurance Products:
- Directors and officers
- Internet banking and cyber-security
- Bank card protection
- The bond
- Employment protection liability and workers’ compensation
