NAIC President and Virginia Insurance Commissioner Scott A. White welcomed attendees to the NAIC’s 2026 Spring National Meeting on March 23 in a keynote address that focused on several of the organization’s strategic priorities for the year ahead. 

Along with sharing an update on risk-mitigation grant programs that several state insurance departments are spearheading amid increasingly severe natural disasters, Commissioner White highlighted a visit state insurance commissioners made over the weekend to the Dixon Trail neighborhood in Escondido, Calif. Dixon Trail is the first development built to meet the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety's (IBHS) Wildfire Prepared Home™ neighborhood-level wildfire resilience standard.  

“What they saw as they walked along those streets wasn’t just individual wildfire-prepared homes," said Commissioner White. "They saw an entire wildfire-prepared neighborhood built on a blueprint that blended risk mitigation and modern building standards. And, hopefully, these homes are a potential glimpse into a more resilient future.” 

Commissioner White also discussed the NAIC’s Homeowners Market Data Call, calling it “a key part of our efforts to address affordability and availability challenges.” 

Regarding state insurance regulators’ work to regulate insurers’ use of artificial intelligence, Commissioner White noted, “Our approach at the NAIC has been to strike the right balance. We don’t want to stand in the way of innovation that generally serves consumers. But we do want to make sure that it is used transparently, fairly, and in ways that hold up to scrutiny.” 

He also discussed issues including state regulation in light of “the changing investment risk profile of life insurers,” describing a “straightforward” overall goal of ensuring “that the capital insurers hold reflects the risk they're actually taking.”  

For more information about the NAIC’s 2026 Spring National Meeting, follow us on social media and visit the NAIC’s Meetings and Events page. 

You can find Commissioner White’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, below: 

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Thank you, Commissioner Lara, for welcoming us and for the kind words. You’re a tough act to follow.  

So, let me begin by saying what an honor it is to serve as your president this year. We’re just a few months into 2026, and we’re already off to a productive start to the year.  

But today I want to focus on the work in front of us. I’m really excited to talk to you about the priorities of the NAIC this year and where we’re focusing our attention. 

And there’s so much we could talk about—we have a lot going on. But I’m going to focus on our top three priorities, and within those priorities, the one or two areas I think will have the most impact when we look back a few years from now. 

I’m also going to piggyback off Commissioner Lara, I’ll start with our work that addresses natural catastrophe risk and resiliency. We’re continuing to see climate-driven natural disasters have devastating impacts across the United States—not just headline-making catastrophes but also the unnamed storms and extreme weather that are just as impactful on our communities.  

None more so than the L.A. wildfires last year, as we just heard from Commissioner Lara.  And as we gather here in California, I think back to the many commissioners who made the trip to Altadena last year to see firsthand the impact of the wildfires and the discussions that took place to learn how we can better protect our communities from future disasters.  

That learning continues. Just Saturday, we had more than 20 commissioners visit the Dixon Trail community in Escondido, California, about 30 miles north of here. What they saw as they walked along those streets wasn’t just individual wildfire-prepared homes. They saw an entire wildfire-prepared neighborhood built on a blueprint that blended risk mitigation and modern building standards. And, hopefully, these homes are a potential glimpse into a more resilient future. 

Let’s take a look at their visit.  

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What you just saw is something I see daily in my work with the NAIC—commissioners and regulators from across the country coming together to learn and take those leading-edge practices back to their states. 

And there’s no better example than these department-led risk-mitigation grant programs we’ve been talking so much about these last few years. And what started in Alabama has spread to other parts of the country. Louisiana has in just a few short years provided grant funds for about 4,500 of the total 11,000 [IBHS] FORTIFIED™ roofs in that state and counting.  

States like New Mexico and California are developing programs to address wildfire risk. In Oklahoma, Minnesota, and Arkansas, grant programs have launched or are being developed to address the severe convective storm peril which has been driving natural catastrophe losses in the U.S.  

In total, there are now more than 20 insurance departments that have or are in the process of developing risk mitigation programs with the advisory and technical services of the NAIC’s CAT Center of Excellence team. 

And we know what makes these DOI grant programs so powerful—it’s their multiplier effect. Their impacts extend well beyond the thousands of homes that are built through grant funds. By building the ecosystem, we’re talking about the contractors, the standards, the consumer awareness. What we call the “culture of resilience.”  

These DOI-led programs create the infrastructure for FORTIFIED™ roof construction to take hold even without grant support. The funding plants the seed; the market does the rest. 

We saw how this works when Hurricane Sally struck the Gulf Coast in 2020. Data from the storm told a clear story: homes with roofs built to FORTIFIED™ standards had far fewer claims, which is not surprising. And, maybe more importantly, the data showed that over 80% of FORTIFIED™ homes were built without grant funding. 

The question is how do we scale this? How do we go from the now nearly 100,000 total FORTIFIED™ homes to the tens of millions of homes throughout the U.S. that could benefit from these protections?  

This is the work that will occupy us in the coming years, work that the state DOIs are taking the lead in. While others are talking about the importance of property risk reduction, it is the states—with assistance from the NAIC and the CAT Center of Excellence—that are actually out implementing risk reduction on the ground in their communities. 

I also want to spend a few minutes talking about the upcoming Homeowners Market Data Call and why this is such a key part of our efforts to address affordability and availability challenges. It is also to assess the effectiveness of mitigation programs and better educate consumers and legislators. 

You’ll recall our first version of this was back in 2024. We decided to spend last year on a “reset” under Commissioner Yaworsky’s leadership, working to improve and refine it in a number of areas.  

To begin with, it will collect data from 2025 going all the way back to 2018. It will also capture roughly 98% of the market in most states, up from 80% in the first data call, and it extends beyond traditional homeowners policies. 

It’s been expanded to include more information designed to address the needs of a particular state, whether it’s wildfire deductibles or non-renewals because of particular hazards. 

It’s really hard to overemphasize how impactful it is to have this ZIP-code-level data at our fingertips. We can now do so much with it to gain insights into our market we didn’t have before. It opens the world to layering this information with other data sets, such as Census data, FEMA hazard maps, and CAT models.  

We can better understand how insurers differentiate the cost of insurance by geographic region within a state. Or for states with FORTIFIED™ programs, where to focus those efforts. 

Armed with this information, states can begin to respond to events in real-time. They can layer in homeowners data to an approaching hurricane, for example, to better understand where potential losses may occur and the solvency impact of the companies writing in those areas.  They can provide much-needed information to the emergency management community.  

So, with this data call, we have a submission deadline for June for the data. And we also plan to issue a public report in early 2027, after the public and interested parties, of course, have had the opportunity to weigh in. 

This is an important development. It will allow us to better tell our own story based on what the data tells us, instead of having to react, as we so often do, to stories in the press—oftentimes based mostly on anecdotes. Or the latest academic paper or other reports that purport to understand our markets better than we do as regulators.   

So, let’s next turn to insurers’ use of AI. There are few developments in recent memory that have generated more excitement—or more unease—than artificial intelligence. The use of AI is moving fast across every sector of the economy, including the insurance industry.  

We all recognize the potential benefits for insurers: greater efficiency, more accurate risk assessment, faster claims processing.  

But the risks are also real and must be managed. Our approach at the NAIC has been to strike the right balance. We don’t want to stand in the way of innovation that generally serves consumers. But we do want to make sure that it is used transparently, fairly, and in ways that hold up to scrutiny.  

So, we’ve spent the past five years or so doing the hard preparatory work: developing core principles for responsible use of AI and then translating those principles into a model bulletin that provides guidance to the industry on their use of AI and how to comply with our existing laws.   

That brings us to our next important phase, which began last year and will be the focus this year, as we move from principles and guidance to actual implementation. 

I’m referring to our development of what we call the AI Systems Evaluation Tool, which gives insurance departments the ability to assess how an insurer is using AI when they walk through the door for an examination. 

For the first time, we're going to have a structured, consistent way to understand in real time how insurers are using AI systems and the effectiveness of their governance and oversight of these systems. 

We’re in the early stages of a pilot this year, and we expect that the experience of the pilot will give us insights to improve the tool in hopes of adopting it by the Fall National Meeting. 

The third strategic priority I’ll touch on addresses the changing investment risk profile of life insurers. We're all familiar by now with the significant transformation that has occurred as life insurers have shifted more of their balance sheets towards alternative investments and relied more on offshore reinsurance arrangements.  

This has resulted in a meaningfully different risk profile for an industry that millions of Americans depend on for their retirement security. 

There's been a lot of good work done in this area over the last five years, much of it under the rubric of the insurer investment framework adopted in 2024.  

A key part of that work is making sure our risk-based capital framework keeps pace with how life insurers are investing, and accounting for newer or emerging assets like collateralized loan obligations, or CLOs.  

Our RBC Model Governance Task Force, created last year under Past President Jon Godfread’s leadership, does just that—by updating and strengthening the governance framework for RBC requirements.  

Our key deliverable last year was to develop principles to guide future adjustments to our RBC requirements, and our focus this year will be on identifying potential gaps within our RBC formulas. 

The overall goal is straightforward: make sure that the capital insurers hold reflects the risk they're actually taking. 

In addition, as insurers continue to rely more on other jurisdictions to back U.S. policyholder obligations through the use of offshore reinsurance, we’ve taken steps to make sure there are adequate reserves backing these obligations.   

So last year, we adopted a rule that will test for reserve adequacy and provide regulators with greater transparency into the reserves and assets supporting the ceded business. (I want to give a hat tip to Fred Anderson for his leadership on this work.) 

Before I close, I want to step back from the policy and the frameworks for a moment and talk about why this work matters. And I mention this in connection with a new initiative the NAIC is launching this year to comprehensively assess our current market regulatory framework. This work is going to be important, but as we move forward, I don’t want us to lose sight of what market regulation is ultimately for.  

It’s important to always keep top of mind that behind every policy, every claim, every coverage dispute, there's a person who, if they paid their premiums faithfully, trusted that when something went wrong, they would be protected. And our job is to make sure that trust is honored. 

And that lesson was brought home to me early in my career. I’m not going to tell you what year it was. But let's just say I was more concerned at the time over the impact of Y2K than the threat of a serious cyber-attack.  

My wife and I and our one-month-old daughter had moved back to Virginia from St. Louis to be closer to our family. I had begun looking for work but was still waiting for the results of the Virginia bar exam. And to make ends meet, I found a part-time job at the Virginia Bureau of Insurance as a research analyst. I’d never given much thought to insurance, except I knew from my job at the firm in St. Louis that it was a key source of funds when a case was settled or decided in court. 

I remember my first day there walking to the fifth floor of the building, a dimly lit room filled with rows of cubicles, one of which I sat in with just a code book and legal pad on my desk, doing research on topics like mold exclusion and uninsured motorist coverage.  

Pretty mind-numbing stuff. But as I sat there, I began to overhear on the other side of my cubicle all these telephone calls coming in, and I soon figured out they were from consumers who were upset or had questions about their insurance coverage. 

I still remember to this day the level of distress or worry—or even fear—that came through on some of the calls, even though I couldn’t hear what they were saying. 

A consumer was upset that their homeowners policy had been nonrenewed even though they’d never filed a claim, for example, or a consumer’s medical claim had been denied, and they worried about how they would ever find the money to pay the hospital bill.   

And these were not abstract policy questions. These were people in genuine distress trying to navigate a system they didn't fully understand. 

The other thing I remember was the professionalism and expertise of the Bureau employees who took these calls. I remember admiring how calm they were, how knowledgeable, and how they treated every person on the other end of that line with patience and respect.  

I moved to another part of the building a few weeks later, but that experience left a real impression on me. And ultimately it was a factor in my decision not to immediately return to the private sector. “Maybe,” I thought, “I’ll consider sticking around at the Bureau for a little while and see how things develop.”  

A couple of decades later, I feel privileged every day to have made this a career, being able to help consumers and doing my small part to help foster a strong, stable insurance marketplace. 

And that brings me back to our market regulation initiative. Our aim here is to develop a strategic, forward-thinking roadmap to determine if today’s market conduct regulatory framework has the data, the system, the tools, and the supervisory approaches needed to oversee a rapidly evolving industry. 

This work will occur in our Market Regulation and Consumer Affairs (D) Committee, and it’s going to be led by Director Gillespie and Director Nelson. We hope to share proposed recommendations for enhancements later this year.  

Our 2026 priorities are not only domestic issues, but rather ones of interest around the globe. As work progresses, we will continue to share our experiences and expertise with, as well as learn from, our international counterparts. 

Along those lines, I am very pleased to announce that the board of ASSAL, the Association of Insurance Supervisors of Latin America, has recently approved the NAIC to join as an Associate Member. Steps such as this help further our relationships with our international partners and highlight the important role state insurance supervisors play at the global level. 

In closing, I look forward to working together with all of you, both during this meeting and throughout the rest of the year. The discussions, debates, and conversations we’ll be having to advance the work of protecting policyholders and promoting sound, stable insurance markets—this is how we move forward, and it’s always been the strength of this organization. 

Thank you again for joining. And with that, we are adjourned. 

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