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Invest in the best. Hi, this is Alyssa Burley with Rancher Mays' Media Communications and Client Services Department. Thank you for listening to today's top Rancher Mays' News brought to you by our Safety and Risk Management Network, Studio One. Welcome, this is Anne Wright, surety account executive here with Rancher Mays' Insurance.
We're going to talk a little bit about how we place business with our surety companies. We have a lot of options our clients rely on us to obviously be the professionals they expect handling their business but also making sure we get the right surety relationship that's going to serve them best with all the terms, conditions, and long-term relationships. So I have Mike Hall here with me today. I want to do a quick introduction.
Sure. Hi, my name is Mike Hall with Philadelphia Insurance, Vice President, and I run the Western Region, which includes the Northwest, Northern California, Southern California, and Hawaii. We've been doing surety for 29 years and Anne and I have known each other for, I would say, probably 27 years of that. So we've been doing business a long time and I'm happy to be here.
Well, thank you for being here. We appreciate it. So when we are looking at placing a piece of business with a surety, you know, we're looking at the type of contractor, developer, the type of work they do, job sizes they need, who they do work for, and then the various underwriting information that they have that's available. So again, we have lots of choices and lots of markets, but we found Philadelphia to be a very strong market for some of our best clients for many years.
I think Philly's been around for 11 years now. Philly's surety's been around for just over about 12 and a half years and then Philadelphia Insurance itself has been around for 60 plus years. Okay, so they brought in some bright talent with Mike and some of his peers to run the surety division. It's been very successful.
So we found it a very good market for a lot of our accounts. With regard to Philly, what we find sets you apart from some other surety's is, again, the relationships. It's very important that we have the personal relationships with the enderators. So when you say we've been working together and knowing each other for 27 years, that matters, obviously.
What do you think sets Philly apart from some of your competitors? Oh, I would say one thing that sets us apart is we're a plus plus 15 ranked by AMVEST. That's the highest ranking you can get. There are other surety's, but there's only a handful of them that get that ranking.
I think we provide good service and a consistent underwriting approach. So the broker and the account knows exactly what to expect as we're going through the underwriting process. Yeah, it's an excellent point. Something we have to take into consideration with a lot of public agencies and general contractors that the AMVEST rating is an important tool that they use to determine what's acceptable as a surety company.
So there's a lot of A minus surety companies out there right now, which is still an A and it's still, you know, it's not a big negative. But to be able to say you've got that A plus plus 15 rating is definitely huge for you all. It definitely comes into play on the commercial side of the house when they're looking at large peel bonds or bonds of that nature. Gotcha.
Yeah, some of the smaller to mid size accounts though you write those two. So I would typically think that the very large general contractors or developers are going to need that A plus plus 15 rating, but it's nice to know that Philly is available for some of other accounts that we've been able to place with you along the way. So it's not just meant for mega companies. Exactly.
And you also have a small contract program. You were one of the early entrants, I think, into that what we call the express program. Yes, we have on the contract side we have it's called just contract express and it's for programs of job sizes, $500,000 single up to $1,000,000 aggregate programs. We can't go a little bit larger in that area, but that's just kind of typically where they operate.
And then on the commercial side we have commercial express which handles those small statutory bonds, the agent or even the account itself and go online and purchase a bond there, it prints out the bond form for you and you're ready to go. Very efficient. Yeah, it's very efficient. We have the contract, we got the programs of $300 million.
There's other competitors of ours out there that do substantially more than that. It fits your needs. Yep. Very good.
We look at claims handling as being an important part of the shirty relationship as well. Obviously we all underwrite to avoid claims. We underwrite to a zero loss ratio, but claims happen. So you have anything you can share about your claims people and how well they work to resolve issues.
Yeah, our claims department is great. In addition to just the normal claims handler, we have one local here in Southern California, but we also have an engineer on staff. So if you had a situation where there's maybe a big bid spread and our account was confident in their number, we could have the engineer talk with the account, go through the project, walk through it, get a better understanding, and then they'll just provide that additional feedback to the underwriting team and then we make the final decision on whether we write the final bond or not. We also have accountants on staff.
So if the account is in difficult situation, we can send the accountant in, go through the books and records, get a better assessment of kind of what's going on, you know, make sense to finance the account through the project or is it better to take some other approach to resolving the claim situations. Sure. So value added services that anybody through the project. So if we're up early on in the underwriting process, we have the ability to take collateral and we can also use funds control to maybe get over some hurdles in the underwriting process.
So again, all the tools. That's wonderful. Well, I know there was a recent newsletter that came out from Philly and they talked about selecting the right relationship and they mentioned reputation size and service. And again, that's what our clients look for in us and that's what we look for in our shirties and really certainly fits the bill when it comes to reputation and size of the company and service to us as the agents and then our clients to get them on their way and grow with the relationship and grow their business and again, the value that you bring has been a great experience in my career with you.
So thank you for that. Likewise. So it's about where we're going to find any way, any reasonable way to get the bond done. If we can do it with Philly, we're going to do it with Philly.
Mike is one of our go-tos and we appreciate you being here today in Studio One. Thank you for having me. If anyone has any questions, you can contact me at ranchomeza.com. Thank you.
Thank you. This is Alyssa Burley with Rancho Mesa. Thanks for tuning in to our latest episode produced by Studio One. For more information, visit us at ranchomeza.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter.