Horace Mann Educators Corporation

views updated May 23 2018

Horace Mann Educators Corporation

1 Horace Mann Plaza
Springfield, Illinois 62715-0001
U.S.A.
(217) 789-2500
Fax:(217) 788-5157
Web site: http://www.horacemann.com

Public Company
Incorporated: 1945
Employees: 2,700
Total Assets: $3.86 billion (1996)
Stock Exchanges: New York
SICs: 6331 Fire, Marine, & Casualty Insurance; 6311 Life Insurance; 6719 Holding Companies, Not Elsewhere Classified

An insurance holding company, Horace Mann Educators Corporation is a leading insurer serving educators in the United States. The company carries a variety of lines of insurance. First, the company offers private passenger automobile insurance in the forms of personal liability, collision coverage, and comprehensive coverage. Horace Mann also sells homeowners insurance against fire and theft, as well as individual life insurance policies, including traditional term and whole life and flexible life insurance that combines term life with interest-sensitive whole life and interest-bearing accounts. In addition, the company deals in tax-qualified annuities and life insurance and provides group life and disability insurance to school employees.

Serving U.S. Educators

Horace Mann operates predominantly in North Carolina, Texas, Illinois, Minnesota, and California, although its overall market includes the 4.5 million employees in public school districts across the United States. This includes 2.8 million elementary and public school teachers, in addition to 1.7 million administrators, office workers, maintenance personnel, bus drivers, and support staff. According to a Standard & Poor’s insurance rating analysis, “Horace Mann gears its products primarily to teachers and other employees of public schools and their families. This tends to be a well-educated, conservative, and financially stable market that possesses favorable insurance-risk characteristics. Customers typically have moderate annual incomes; employment is not recession sensitive, and many educators belong to two-income households. Their financial planning tends to focus on security, primary insurance needs, and conservative savings.”

Approximately 10 percent of all U.S. school employees are insured by Horace Mann through a network of 1,000 agents (who also act as field underwriters) or through their membership in the National Education Association (NBA). The NBA is comprised of more than two million members, and in 1994 Horace Mann enjoyed NEA-sponsorship in 42 states. “Horace Mann,” a Standard & Poor’s insurance rating analysis revealed, “has flourished by offering a broad range of personal insurance products to primary and secondary educators. The niche marketing strategy, accompanied by prudent underwriting standards, has translated into impressive underwriting margins and strong operating income.”

Indeed, Horace Mann’s agents have been successful for the company. They are, in fact, key to the company’s operations. As Standard & Poor’s indicated: “A cornerstone of Horace Mann’s marketing strategy is its exclusive agency force who are company employees. ... These agents sell only the company’s products and all agents are required to sell both life insurance and property/casualty products. Many of these agents previously were teachers and principals who utilize their contacts among, and knowledge of, the target market. Through personal contact and identification of customers’ needs, the company’s agents seek to build a strong client relationship and provide a complete package of insurance protection.”

Horace Mann Educators Corporation maintains four subsidiaries: Allegiance Life Insurance Company, Horace Mann Life Insurance Company, Horace Mann Service Corporation, and Teachers Insurance Company.

Founded by Educators

Horace Mann’s dedication to the educator market is no surprise since it was founded by two teachers in Springfield, Illinois, in 1945. Wishing to provide automobile insurance for their association peers, the two teachers established the Illinois Education Association Mutual Assurance Company. Later they renamed the company Horace Mann, after the father of public education in the United States, to testify to the company’s commitment to educators.

Expansion began shortly after the company was established. Within two years, Horace Mann offered automobile insurance to teachers in other states. By 1949, the company extended into the life insurance business, providing a full-range of life insurance services to educators and their families. In 1961, when the U.S. Congress created legislation for tax-deferred annuities, Horace Mann also ventured into the annuity market.

Changing Hands

In 1974, INA Corporation, an insurance and financial services company headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, began to purchase more and more holdings of Horace Mann. Eventually, INA gained control of the company in 1975. In 1982, INA Corporation merged with Connecticut General Corporation to form CIGNA, a holding company. That year Paul J. Kardos assumed the presidency and position of chief executive officer at Horace Mann. As the company’s leader he guided Horace Mann through a management-led buyout and, later, an initial public offering. (Kardos, a graduate of Grove City College in Pennsylvania, joined Horace Mann in 1977. Previously he worked at the Life Insurance Company of North America.)

In 1989, Kardos and other Horace Mann management purchased the company from CIGNA with the financial assistance of an investor group. GGvA, an investment banking firm specializing in management-led buyouts, controlled the LBO. That same year, Horace Mann began managing Allegiance Insurance Company, a property and casualty insurance firm located in California.

Kardos coordinated Horace Mann’s initial public offering in 1991. Each share of common stock sold for $18. At that time, the company’s focus also shifted away from exposure to collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs) and towards investment in tax-exempt securities, as market conditions have been attractive.

Horace Mann acquired Allegiance Insurance, which by then served 400,000 educators, in 1994. The company also introduced a program that year, Pathways, to facilitate the sale of life insurance by its agents. Pathways trained agents to close sales. “The Pathways program is a highly effective training tool that provides agents with a step-by-step process for closing sales in all lines of business,” revealed a Horace Mann annual report. “Its success is demonstrated by the many experienced Horace Mann agents who rely on the program.” And close sales they did.

In 1995, Horace Mann was able to repurchase half of GGvA’s interest in the company. In July, Horace Mann issued a secondary offering of stock to sell the remaining six million shares at $23.38 each in the United States and abroad. In addition, more than 900,000 over-allotment shares worth $20 million were sold, reducing borrowings under the company’s bank credit line. At the time, Kardos reported that: “We are pleased by the positive market acceptance of our offering, as evidenced by several market barometers. We gained a large number of new institutional investors, enhanced the liquidity of our shares by increasing public float by some 40 percent, and witnessed a more than 20 percent share price gain since the stock repurchase and secondary offering were announced.” The overall effect of the sales, though, was to close the disposition of a 44 percent control interest of common stock. “Removing this uncertainty,” said Kardos in Business Week, “returns our total focus to business growth and further increases shareholder value.”

The company also expanded the size of its board of directors in 1995. Directors grew from eight to nine in number. Horace Mann also introduced its AutoEase program in all 50 states. The program allowed the payment of monthly automobile insurance premiums through electronic funds transfers from bank accounts.

A Year of Milestones

In 1996, Ward’s Financial included Horace Mann on its lists of the 50 top property/casualty and life/health insurers. This placed the company among the safest and best-performing insurers in the United States. To be included on the lists, an insurer had to withstand scrutiny of its performance over the past five years. Ward’s Financial listed only the companies with the highest profits demonstrating the most security in each market segment.

At this time, the National Education Association selected Horace Mann to provide professional liability insurance for its 2.2 million members in a three-year contract. The company’s plans offered NEA members protection from personal financial liability as the result of employment-related occurrences.

For the first time in the company’s history, its sales force exceeded 1,000 agents in 1996. “Two primary factors drove this growth,” noted the 1996 annual report. “First, our recruiting efforts have become more targeted and effective, so that not only are we hiring more agents, those we are hiring now are more likely to succeed. Second, we are seeing positive results from programs designed to improve agent retention. Most of these are geared to new agents—those with less than two years experience—since turnover drops off sharply once agents pass this milestone.”

Company Perspectives:

For more than 50 years, Horace Mann’s greatest strength has been its commitment to meeting the insurance needs of America’s educators and their families. This focus has made the company a leader in its field, a position it maintains by offering high-quality, competitively priced products and a superior level of customer service.

One existing program, the Pathways program, was revised and extended to include automobile and homeowners insurance as well as life insurance to assist agents in closing sales. The company also developed new programs to enhance the effectiveness of agents. For instance, Horace Mann instituted the Service on Call program to assist newer agents not yet able to secure office support or secretarial staff. The program allowed an agent to forward calls to a home office when he or she was on sales calls. This enabled home office service representatives to respond personally to callers. In addition Horace Mann issued new educational and promotional material about annuities for its agents, as well as distributed three videos about retirement planning for use at seminars.

Toward the end of the year, Horace Mann began to withdraw from the group medical insurance business. The company’s group medical line lost $1.2 million in 1995 and more than $3 million in 1996. Though the group medical line accounted for close to seven percent of Horace Mann’s total premiums written, the company intended to stop writing new group medical policies by January 1997 and to cease renewing group medical insurance policies by January 1998. According to Kardos, “Horace Mann’s strategic withdrawal from the group medical business will allow the company to focus on its core lines of business, including its group life and disability insurance.” Ending its group medical line cost the company $8 million in net operating losses plus charges for severance and other expenses. In total, 40 positions were eliminated at Horace Mann by 1998.

A Year of Innovations

Innovations—focusing on core business lines—to assist agents continued throughout 1997. Horace Mann provided its leading 400 agents with a database on disk to assist with their monthly marketing programs. Updated monthly, the disk helped agents identify clients for cross-selling. The disk even contained information and programming to pre-fill paperwork for agents. Horace Mann planned to extend this service to others besides leading agents in the years ahead.

Horace Mann also introduced new products for agents to sell in 1997. The company launched five new term life products and three new variable annuity funds, notably small cap, international, and socially responsible funds.

In March 1997, Horace Mann accepted an Aon Group option program enabling the company to replace up to $100 million in equity in the event of a catastrophe. A risk management innovation, this multi-year, $100 million Catastrophe Equity Put was fully underwritten by Centre Reinsurance Ltd. and completed Horace Mann’s plans to augment its reinsurance structure. When Horace Mann finalized the program, its rating by A. M. Best increase from “excellent” to “superior.”

Priorities in the Future

Horace Mann hoped to strengthen its relationship with educators and their organizations in the future. By the year 2000, the total educator market should reach 10 million. Horace Mann expected a two percent growth in its target market by 2000, with an eight percent annual turnover in the teacher market. Moreover, the company anticipated an increase of five million non-teacher school employees to the year 2000.

To serve its growing market, Horace Mann planned to invest in its agents, products, and customer service. The company hoped to control expenses in the future and to anticipate and counter moves by its competitors, thereby enhancing value for Horace Mann shareholders. “Our plan...,” wrote chairman of the board Ralph S. Saul and Kardos in their 1996 letter to shareholders, “is to build on our successes and further accelerate the company’s forward momentum.”

Principal Subsidiaries

Allegiance Life Insurance Company; Horace Mann Life Insurance Company; Horace Mann Service Corporation; Teachers Insurance Company.

Horace Mann Educators Corporation

views updated May 18 2018

Horace Mann Educators Corporation

1 Horace Mann Plaza
Springfield, Illinois 62715-0001
U.S.A.
Telephone: (217) 789-2500
Fax: (217) 788-5161
Web site: http://www.horacemann.com

Public Company
Incorporated: 1945
Employees: 2,400
Total Assets: $6.329 billion (2006)
Stock Exchanges: New York
Ticker Symbol: HMN
NAIC: 524126 Direct Property and Casualty Insurance Carriers; 524113 Direct Life Insurance Carriers; 551112 Offices of Other Holding Companies

An insurance holding company, Horace Mann Educators Corporation is a leading insurer serving educators in the United States. Through its five principal subsidiaries, the company markets and underwrites personal lines of property and casualty and life insurance as well as retirement annuities. According to Horace Mann's 2006 annual report, its nearly one million customers have moderate annual income and live in two-income households. At the end of 2006, the company employed 848 full-time agents but began to shift its business model from a single-person agent operation to its new Agency Business Model, with agents in outside offices with support personnel and licensed product specialists. Horace Mann operates in 48 states and the District of Columbia. Its top five states based on direct insurance premiums and contract deposits for all product lines are North Carolina, Florida, Illinois, California, and South Carolina.

FOUNDED BY EDUCATORS

Horace Mann's dedication to the educator market is no surprise since it was founded by two teachers in Springfield, Illinois, in 1945. Wishing to provide automobile insurance for their association peers, the two teachers established the Illinois Education Association Mutual Assurance Company. Later they renamed the company Horace Mann, after the father of public education in the United States, to testify to the company's commitment to educators.

CHANGING HANDS

In 1974, INA Corporation, an insurance and financial services company headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, began to purchase more and more holdings of Horace Mann. Eventually, INA gained control of the company in 1975. In 1982, INA Corporation merged with Connecticut General Corporation to form CIGNA, a holding company. That year Paul J. Kardos assumed the presidency and position of chief executive officer at Horace Mann. As the company's leader he guided Horace Mann through a management-led buyout and, later, an initial public offering (IPO). (Kardos, a graduate of Grove City College in Pennsylvania, joined Horace Mann in 1977. Previously he worked at the Life Insurance Company of North America.)

In 1989, Kardos and other Horace Mann management purchased the company from CIGNA with the financial assistance of an investor group. GGvA, an investment banking firm specializing in management-led buyouts, controlled the leveraged buyout. That same year, Horace Mann began managing Allegiance Insurance Company, a property and casualty insurance firm located in California. Allegiance Insurance changed its name to Horace Mann Property & Casualty in 2001.

Kardos coordinated Horace Mann's IPO in 1991. Each share of common stock sold for $18. At that time, the company's focus also shifted away from exposure to collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs) and toward investment in tax-exempt securities.

Horace Mann acquired Allegiance Insurance, which by then served 400,000 educators, in 1994. The company also introduced a program that year, Pathways, to facilitate the sale of life insurance by its agents. Pathways trained agents to close sales. "The Pathways program is a highly effective training tool that provides agents with a step-by-step process for closing sales in all lines of business," revealed a Horace Mann annual report. "Its success is demonstrated by the many experienced Horace Mann agents who rely on the program." And close sales they did.

In 1995, Horace Mann was able to repurchase half of GGvA's interest in the company. In July, Horace Mann issued a secondary offering of stock to sell the remaining six million shares at $23.38 each in the United States and abroad. In addition, more than 900,000 over-allotment shares worth $20 million were sold, reducing borrowings under the company's bank credit line. At the time, Kardos reported that: "We are pleased by the positive market acceptance of our offering, as evidenced by several market barometers. We gained a large number of new institutional investors, enhanced the liquidity of our shares by increasing public float by some 40 percent, and witnessed a more than 20 percent share price gain since the stock repurchase and secondary offering were announced." The overall effect of the sales, though, was to close the disposition of a 44 percent control interest of common stock. "Removing this uncertainty," said Kardos in Business Week, "returns our total focus to business growth and further increases shareholder value."

A YEAR OF MILESTONES

In 1996, Ward's Financial included Horace Mann on its lists of the 50 top property/casualty and life/health insurers. This placed the company among the safest and best-performing insurers in the United States. To be included on the lists, an insurer had to withstand scrutiny of its performance over the past five years. Ward's Financial listed only the companies with the highest profits demonstrating the most security in each market segment.

At this time, the National Education Association (NEA) selected Horace Mann to provide professional liability insurance for its 2.2 million members in a three-year contract. The company's plans offered NEA members protection from personal financial liability as the result of employment-related occurrences.

For the first time in the company's history, its sales force exceeded 1,000 agents in 1996. "Two primary factors drove this growth," noted the 1996 annual report. "First, our recruiting efforts have become more targeted and effective, so that not only are we hiring more agents, those we are hiring now are more likely to succeed. Second, we are seeing positive results from programs designed to improve agent retention. Most of these are geared to new agents—those with less than two years experience—since turnover drops off sharply once agents pass this milestone."

COMPANY PERSPECTIVES

Horace Mann is proud to be the largest national multiline insurance company serving America's educators and their families. When choosing an insurance and financial services company, you want a company you can trust. We have a full line of products tailored to meet your needs coupled with programs specifically designed for teachers.

Toward the end of the year, Horace Mann began to withdraw from the group medical insurance business. The company's group medical line lost $1.2 million in 1995 and more than $3 million in 1996. Though the group medical line accounted for close to 7 percent of Horace Mann's total premiums written, the company intended to stop writing new group medical policies by January 1997 and to cease renewing group medical insurance policies by January 1998. According to Kardos, "Horace Mann's strategic withdrawal from the group medical business will allow the company to focus on its core lines of business, including its group life and disability insurance." Ending its group medical line cost the company $8 million in net operating losses plus charges for severance and other expenses. In total, 40 positions were eliminated at Horace Mann by 1998.

A YEAR OF INNOVATIONS

Innovations—focusing on core business lines—to assist agents continued throughout 1997. Horace Mann provided its leading 400 agents with a database on disk to assist with their monthly marketing programs. Updated monthly, the disk helped agents identify clients for cross-selling. The disk even contained information and programming to prefill paperwork for agents. Horace Mann planned to extend this service to others besides leading agents in the years ahead.

In March 1997, Horace Mann accepted an Aon Group option program enabling the company to replace up to $100 million in equity in the event of a catastrophe. A risk management innovation, this multi-year, $100 million Catastrophe Equity Put was fully underwritten by Centre Reinsurance Ltd. and completed Horace Mann's plans to augment its reinsurance structure. When Horace Mann finalized the program, its rating by A.M. Best increase from "excellent" to "superior."

Horace Mann hoped to strengthen its relationship with educators and their organizations in the late 1990s. By 2000, the total educator market was expected to reach ten million. Horace Mann anticipated a 2 percent growth in its target market by 2000, with an 8 percent annual turnover in the teacher market. Moreover, the company anticipated an increase of five million non-teacher school employees to the year 2000.

KEY DATES

1945:: Two teachers establish the Illinois Education Association Mutual Assurance Company, which is later renamed Horace Mann.
1949:: The company extends into the life insurance business, providing a full-range of life insurance services to educators and their families.
1961:: Horace Mann expands into annuities.
1975:: INA Corporation gains control of the company.
1982:: INA merges with Connecticut General Corporation to form CIGNA, a holding company.
1989:: Paul J. Kardos and other Horace Mann management purchase the company from CIGNA.
1991:: Horace Mann goes public.
1994:: Horace Mann acquires Allegiance Insurance Company.
1996:: The company's sales force exceeds 1,000 agents for the first time in its history.
2001:: Allegiance Insurance changes its name to Horace Mann Property & Casualty.
2006:: The company adopts an agency business model.

To serve its growing market, Horace Mann planned to invest in its agents, products, and customer service. The company hoped to control expenses in the future and to anticipate and counter moves by its competitors, thereby enhancing value for Horace Mann shareholders. "Our plan," wrote chairman of the board Ralph S. Saul and Kardos in their 1996 letter to shareholders, "is to build on our successes and further accelerate the company's forward momentum."

HORACE MANN IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Horace Mann ushered in the new millennium by electing Louis Lower II president and CEO. The new chief had his work cut out for him. Indeed, over the past several years the company's earnings had faltered and the company was in need of an overhaul. "Traditional insurers, including Horace Mann, are facing increased competition from banks, securities firms, and other financial service companies that offer one-stop shopping for a variety of investment, insurance and retirement plans," explained a February 2001 State Journal-Register article. As such, Horace Mann focused on launching new investment products and moving into new markets. Along with K–12 teachers, the company broadened its target customer to include administrators and those in higher education.

The company also began to change its investment strategy. The value of its holdings in Worldcom Inc.—a company that filed for bankruptcy amid executive fraud allegations—fell dramatically and forced the company to report a $26.9 million loss in the quarter ending June 30, 2002. Horace Mann broadened its investment portfolio to shield it from disasters at a single company or in one industry. During this time period the company also restructured its claims offices into six regional areas. It hired additional claims adjusters and began using new technology to quicken the claims process.

By 2004, the company's strategy appeared to be paying off. Despite rising catastrophic losses that year related to hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jean, the company's profit reached $54.7 million. Devastating hurricanes, including Katrina, led to additional property claims in 2005. Nevertheless, net income rose by 37 percent over the previous year. Profits climbed again in 2006, reaching $98.7 million.

With sales and profits on the rise, Horace Mann appeared to be back on track. During 2006, the company began to adopt an agency business model. Most of its agents worked from home but would soon become part of fully staffed agencies in outside offices. The move was expected to increase sales and market share. At the same time, the company continued to shield itself from hurricane-related losses by allowing policies in the southeastern United States and Gulf Coast to expire. It also closed two agencies in southern Louisiana and one in southern Florida and expanded the area in which it would no longer provide coverage. Horace Mann revamped its logo and adopted a new marketing tagline—Founded by educators for educators—in 2007. With nearly six years of restructuring behind it, Horace Mann and its management team was confident the company was on the path to success in the years to come.

Charity Anne Dorgan

Updated, Christina Stansell Weaver

PRINCIPAL SUBSIDIARIES

Horace Mann Insurance Company; Teachers Insurance Company; Horace Mann Life Insurance Company; Horace Mann Property & Casualty Insurance Company; Horace Mann Educator Benefits Consulting Corporation.