Comment.

Committed to Diversity

MetLife Auto & Home would like to comment on the article about joint policies for unmarried domestic partners, titled "Home Sweet Home," that appeared in the April 2002 Best's Review. The second paragraph of that article purports to restate a Metropolitan Life (actually, MetLife Auto & Home) procedure disallowing unmarried people from sharing a renters policy.

We were not contacted for comment prior to this article's publication, so we were not afforded the opportunity to represent the facts about our policy regarding renters insurance. If we had been contacted, we could have provided the following statement from the MetLife Auto & Home Underwriting Practices manual regarding renters insurance:

"If the personal property is jointly owned, or considered shared property, a renters policy may be written with both partners listed as named insureds. If the personal property is not jointly owned and not shared, separate renters policies may be written."

Thank you for the opportunity to clarify our position. If there was a mistake made by an individual agent or underwriter so that this policy was not correctly applied, we regret that error. MetLife Auto & Home is a company committed to diversity and to excellent service for all our customers and applicants.

Dan Liparini

Vice President

Corporate Underwriting

MetLife Auto & Home

In the Spotlight *

"The definition for a policy sold online is broad. If it was purchased online with a credit card and no human being talked to...very few policies are being sold online in that narrow definition. Most are sold with a combination of online and off-line interaction, where the initial searching is done online and there's a phone call to follow up. But the online influence is significant."

Mark Guthrie 

Chief Executive Officer

InsWeb Corp.

"I'm hopeful we're going to focus on the fundamentals for the next few years: getting our pricing strategies right and getting the financial performance within the industry at acceptable levels."

Katherine Bardswick

Chief Executive Officer

Co-operators Group Ltd.

"I think this hard market is going to have legs, for two reasons. Here in the U.S., we tend to miss the fact that global equities markets were devastated last year, because, by and large, American companies invest more in fixed income than in equities. But for the global carriers, the combination of the World Trade Center, the decline in equity values and the need to boost reserves for asbestos and other long-tail liabilities means that there's a tremendous amount of supply that's been driven Out. The second reason is that we've gone through such a prolonged period of underpricing, the primary companies are recognizing that they simply cannot afford to write business at the levels we saw throughout the 1990s."

Robert V. Mendelsohn

Group Chief Executive

Royal & Sun Alliance plc

*excerpted from Best Week