With the AIG name continuing to be dragged through the mud (whether by the media, politicians or its own executives notwithstanding), the move to separate the financial giant’s successful property-casualty business from the bloodletting going on at the parent company seems like a smart move.

Our readers seem to agree. In a totally unscientific survey conducted on the AA&B Web site, 51 percent of respondents said the creation of AIU will help stabilize the business, while 26 percent said no and 23 percent voted maybe.

Our readers added the following comments:

Their P&C operations remain strong with good performance. This move should calm the market some with regard to their insurance operations.

The news media has made such a poor image of AIG that our customers will take a higher price for a product that is identical in terms, limits and coverages. I do hope that the public will soon see what the insurance industry is reading.

Most carriers think AIG’s business is either stuff nobody else wants or is priced too cheap. Right now, you can have any piece of AIG business if you can just match the price and coverages. Most insureds, if they had a choice, would move to another company.

Confidence in the “brand” has been dampened.

I certainly hope it will restore customer confidence.

If they can truly legally get out from under AIG as a separate free-standing entity and not have any obligation for AIG debts, it can work.

The AIG name has an unfavorable connotation.

It depends on if they sell it and move on. If they spin and keep some control, they will fail.

Yesterday J.D. Power and Associates came out with an interesting study of what independent insurance agents want in a carrier. The inaugural study was based on input from trade associations like PCI and IIABA, and more than 10 of the biggie insurers, including AIG, Allied, Chubb, Erie and others — in short, they wanted to know what drives agents to deal with a given insurer.

Although the study dealt strictly with personal lines, it paints a clear picture of what carriers can do to make it easier for agents to do business with them.

The results? In measuring agent satisfaction across six factors, the top three drivers were:

* Key carrier contacts (32 percent)
* Policy offerings (23 percent) and
* Claims (16 percent).

I spoke with Jeremy Bowler, senior director of the insurance practice at J.D. Power and Associates (and I’ll be posting an interview with him on our Web site shortly), who discussed some of the other findings.

At a time when we’re coming out of years of cutthroat competition, it’s interesting to see that compensation played a fairly minor role in agents’ decisions to deal with a carrier: Only 5 percent of the more than 1,500 respondents ranked it as a critical factor. However, technology and price were among the six leading factors, at 13 percent and 16 percent, respectively.

The low status of compensation wasn’t the only surprise, Bowler said. In spite of the fact that the survey was conducted in November 2008, with the AIG bailout still fresh in their minds, respondents ranked AIG about in the middle for overall agency satisfaction.

And while products and price were important factors, Bowler agreed that the survey results sent out a loud-and-clear message about the importance of the relationships between the carrier and the agency.

“Personal contact is important, for example, the person who is the key liaison on underwriting is the carrier representative that the agent is dealing with,” he said. “If those folks are not accessible, and supportive and helpful by giving the right answers quickly, the agents will struggle to compete.”

And while technology is important, technology alone is not the silver bullet for agency/carrier relationships. “Some carriers do well on technology, but fall down from the people standpoint,” Bowler said. “A typical agency is appointed to 7 or 8 companies. If all the companies are passing out information but have modest training, the last thing an agency needs is to have to go through an extra process to understand the tools of the trade.”

Interestingly, the J.D. Power study seemed to echo some of the findings of the Big I’s 2008 Agency Universe Study, in which 72 percent of respondents expressed overall satisfaction with their personal lines carriers. The Big I respondents ranked “making it easy for CSRs to write business,” “smooth quoting system” and “reputation with customer/prospects” as the three most improved areas for personal lines carriers — all areas that overlap with the J.D. Power driving factors.

Bowler indicated that J.D. Power was planning on conducting a similar agent survey for commercial lines. They’re a great barometer for insurers to use in fine-tuning their relationships with their distribution forces.

What are the most important satisfaction factors in your carrier relationships? Take a survey on our Web page at:

http://www.agentandbroker.com/ME2/dirsect.asp?sid=E2D3EF32475B4172A42FEE249B241FD4&nm=%3Cb%3E%3Cfont+color%3D%22%23c00000%22%3E+%3E%3C%2Ffont%3E+Take+the+%3Cfont+color%3D%22%23c00000%22%3ESurvey%3C%2Ffont%3E%3C%2Fb%3E

There really isn’t much I can add to the hue and cry following AIG’s announcement Saturday that it would be shelling out $100 billion in bonuses to some of the same clowns who got them into the derivatives mess in the first place. No less than the President himself has vowed to block the move with every legal means at his disposal.

Aside from the initial reaction of shock and disgust, however, the next thought that came to mind was that AIU Holdings Inc’s recent separation from the insurance industry’s answer to Marie Antoinette was a stroke of timing genius.

We recently interviewed John Q. Doyle, who now heads up AIU’s domestic division (read the article)

Doyle stressed that the formation of AIU is the first step toward separation from AIG, including a whole new branding process. Its property-casualty business is solid, and he proudly pointed out that none of the government TARP money went to this segment of AIG’s business.

We recently asked the survey question on our Web site of whether the AIU move will be enough to put an end to AIG’s problems. So far, the majority of readers seem to think it will. What do you think? Take the survey here.