What Are Allocated Loss Adjustment Expenses (ALAE)?

Allocated loss adjustment expenses (ALAE) are costs attributed to the processing of a specific insurance claim. ALAE is part of an insurer’s expense reserves. It is one of the largest expenses for which an insurer has to set aside funds, along with contingent commissions.

Understanding Allocated Loss Adjustment Expenses (ALAE)

Allocated loss adjustment expenses, along with unallocated loss adjustment expenses (ULAE), represent an insurer’s estimate of the money it will pay out in claims and expenses. Insurers set aside reserves for these expenses to ensure claims aren’t made fraudulently and to process legitimate claims quickly.

ALAEs link directly to the processing of a specific claim. These costs may include payments to third parties for activities like investigating claims, acting as loss adjusters, or as legal counsel for the insurer. Expenses associated with ULAE are more general and may include overhead, investigations, and salaries.

Life insurance companies that use in-house employees for field adjustments would report that expense as an unallocated loss adjustment expense.

Special Considerations

Some commercial liability policies contain endorsements, which require the policyholder to reimburse its insurance company for loss adjustment expenses (ALAE or ULAE). Adjusting a loss is “the process of ascertaining the value of a loss or negotiating a settlement.”

Therefore, loss adjustment expenses are most often those costs incurred by an insurance company in defending or settling a liability claim brought against its policyholder. These expenses can include fees charged by attorneys, investigators, experts, arbitrators, mediators, and other fees or expenses incidental to adjusting a claim.

It is important to carefully read the endorsement language, which may say that a loss adjustment expense is not intended to include the policyholder’s attorney fees and costs if an insurer denies coverage and a policyholder successfully sues the insurer. In this situation, where the insurance company has done no actual “adjusting” of the claim, it should not be entitled to apply its deductible to the expenses incurred by the policyholder in defending the claim abandoned by the insurance company.

ALAE vs. Unallocated Loss Adjustment Expenses (ULAE)

Insurers have gradually shifted from categorizing expenses as ULAE to categorizing them as ALAE. This is primarily because insurers are more sophisticated in how they treat claims and have more tools at their disposal to manage the costs associated with claims.

Small, straightforward claims are the easiest for an insurance company to settle and often require less ALAE when compared to claims that may take years to settle. Claims that could result in substantial losses are the most likely to receive extra scrutiny by insurers and may involve in-depth investigations, settlement offers, and litigation. With greater scrutiny comes greater cost.

Analysts can tell how accurate an insurance company has been at estimating its reserves by examining its loss reserve development. Loss reserve development involves an insurer adjusting estimates to its loss and loss adjustment expense reserves over a period of time.

What Is Agribusiness?

Agribusiness is the business sector encompassing farming and farming-related commercial activities. It involves all the steps required to send an agricultural good to market, namely production, processing, and distribution. This industry is an important component of the economy in countries with arable land since agricultural products can be exported.

Agribusiness treats the different aspects of raising agricultural products as an integrated system. Farmers raise animals and harvest fruits and vegetables with the help of sophisticated harvesting techniques, including the use of GPS to direct operations. Manufacturers develop increasingly efficient machines that can drive themselves. Processing plants determine the best way to clean and package livestock for shipping. While each subset of the industry is unlikely to interact directly with the consumer, each is focused on operating efficiently in order to keep prices reasonable.

Understanding Agribusiness

Market forces have a significant impact on the agribusiness sector, as do natural forces, such as changes in the earth’s climate.

• Changes in consumer taste alter what products are grown and raised. For example, a shift in consumer tastes away from red meat may cause demand—and therefore prices—for beef to fall, while increased demand for produce may shift the mix of fruits and vegetables that farmers raise. Businesses unable to rapidly change in accordance with domestic demand may look to export their products abroad. If that fails, they may not be able to compete and remain in business.
• Climate change has placed intensifying pressure on many companies in the agribusiness industry to remain relevant, and profitable, while adapting to the threats posed by large-scale shifts in weather patterns.

Agribusiness Challenges

Countries with farming industries face consistent pressures from global competition. Products such as wheat, corn, and soybeans tend to be similar in different locations, making them commodities. Remaining competitive requires agribusinesses to operate more efficiently, which can require investments in new technologies, new ways of fertilizing and watering crops, and new ways of connecting to the global market.

Global prices of agricultural products may change rapidly, making production planning a complicated activity. Farmers may also face a reduction in usable land as suburban and urban areas expand into their regions.

Use of New Technology

The use of new technology is vital to remain competitive in the global agribusiness sector. Farmers need to reduce crop costs and increase yield per square acre to remain competitive.

New drone technology is at the cutting edge of the industry. An article published in 2016 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) identified Six Ways Drones Are Revolutionizing Agriculture. These techniques, including soil and field analysis, planting, and crop monitoring, will be key to improving crop yields and moving the agribusiness sector forward.

Key areas of concern for the use of drone technology remain the safety of drone operations, privacy issues, and insurance-coverage questions.

Agribusiness Examples

Because agribusiness is a broad industry, it incorporates a wide range of different companies and operations. Agribusinesses include small family farms and food producers up to multinational conglomerates involved in the production of food on a national scale.

Some examples of agribusinesses include farm machinery producers such as Deere & Company, seed and agrichemical manufacturers such as Monsanto, food processing companies such as Archer Daniels Midland Company, as well as farmer’s cooperatives, agritourism companies, and makers of biofuels, animal feeds, and other related products.