US Finance and Insurance Sector NAICS 52

Apr 23, 2025 - US Financial Scams Surge

• People in the US lost $16.6 billion to financial scammers in 2024, a surge of 33% over the previous year, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Seniors were particularly vulnerable to bad actors, accounting for 28% of those losses - or $4.8 billion. People aged 50-59 were the second most affected group with scam losses of $2.5 billion. The FBI report also noted the most prevalent scams include fraudulent investments (people lost $50 billion to these over the last 10 years); business emails pretending to be a supervisor or co-worker asking for money and tech support scams; and emergency scams where someone pretends to be a relative in financial trouble. The states with the most scam losses are Texas, California, and Florida. The FBI gets about 830,000 cyber fraud reports each year and the average person loses $20,000 to those tactics.
• US homeowners have had their insurance premiums go up by 24% over the past three years, according to a report from the Consumer Federation of America (CFA). Between 2021 and 2024, typical homeowners insurance premiums have risen by an average of $649 per customer. On a national level, that translates to a $21 billion price increase for homeowners insurance during the same time period, more than double the rate of inflation. The CFA found that premiums went up for 95% of US zip codes with the biggest increases coming from Utah (up 59%), Illinois (+50%), Arizona (+48), and Pennsylvania (+44). The most expensive states to insure a home were Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Nebraska. The steep price increases and the inability by some customers to find proper insurance in areas prone to natural disasters are creating an unsustainable affordability crisis in home insurance, according to the CFA report.

• Net income for the banking industry rose to $286.2 billion for the year 2024, a 5.6% increase from the prior period, but still well below pre-pandemic levels, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). One-time events during the year resulted in lower expenses, higher noninterest income, and smaller losses on securities. Community banks, though, saw a 2.4% net income dip for the year to $29.5 billion - largely due to higher noninterest expenses (up 6.1%) and higher provision expenses (up 20%). Those expenses, among other losses, took a bite out of community banking’s $2.2 billion in net interest income and $1.1 billion in noninterest income.
• Traditionally regulated insurers are leaving high-risk areas, and thinly capitalized companies that don’t meet normal regulatory standards are filling the gap, according to former Federal Reserve governor Sarah Bloom Raskin. Banks, which require homeowner insurance, accept this form of insurance because banks and other mortgage lenders seldom hold onto the mortgage paper, according to The American Prospect. The market share of homeowner insurance in Florida provided by these lightly regulated insurers grew to 50 percent by 2018, according to a Harvard Business School (HBS) report titled When Insurers Exit: Climate Losses, Fragile Insurers, and Mortgage Markets. A new, nontraditional rating agency called Demotech gives these companies high ratings. At least 15 of these Demotech-approved insurers became insolvent during the period of the HBS study, according to Professor Ishita Sen, one of the report authors.