Percent of business in Illinois by line:
Commercial: 15% Personal: 82% Life & Annuity: 3%

Are you currently appointing new agents? Yes.

What type of agency is your company looking for? Professional, proactive all lines agency with strong personal lines focus and history of growth and profitability. Additionally, we pursue scratch agencies interested in getting their start in the independent agency system.

What are your premium volume requirements? Company seeks agency business plan/goals. ERIE has no quotas but an agency must have history of growth and profitability. ERIE's strong life affiliate offers a broad range of life protection and agents are expected to support that broad product portfolio. Collected life premiums can enhance the contingency bonus for an agency. Contingency bonus requires $100,000 of earned property/casualty premium.

Are you currently doing any niche-marketing program? Look to be competitive in all areas of personal, commercial, and life.

What is your company's most aggressive line of business? Standard and Preferred auto, home, and light commercial. ERIE enjoys strong relationship with their agencies. In ninety percent of their agencies, ERIE has more than 90% of the standard and preferred business. This is attributable to ERIE's broad underwriting appetite and total agency value proposition.

Do you use credit scoring? No.

Do you currently download/upload with your agencies? Yes, on proprietary software for personal lines.

What methods do you use to distribute your insurance products? 100% independent agents-commitment solely to this single distribution channel.

What do you think makes your company different, or stand out from all the rest in Illinois? Why would an agent want to contract with your company? In-depth selection process of our agency force-looking for long-term partnership rooted in value added service. ERIE offers competitive pricing, competitive products, and ease of doing business for personal lines, small to medium commercial lines, life and annuities. We have a nationally recognized claims service with an all lines retention ratio as one of the leading in the industry and a commitment as a carrier to improving the value proposition to our policyholders and to future policyholders.

If we had agents agree to sell homeowners policies with actual cash value endorsements, would you write more business in Southern Illinois? Not applicable. We are actually writing homeowners throughout Illinois.

What are the major ways in which you are interfacing electronically with your agents today? Are you pleased with the results? Significant E-commerce initiative underway, along with current agent only website resource, proprietary software upload/download, and agent locator on company website.

Additional Comments:
2003 will be ERIE's fifth year in Illinois. ERIE currently writes over 60,000 policies in Illinois. In 2002, ERIE appointed 33 new agents and a large percentage of those were startup agents, as that is what the company was founded on. ERIE appoints many agents from referrals from their existing agents and are aggressively looking for new agents in 2003 in the entire state.

ERIE prides themselves as a strong underwriting company. They do not use credit scoring and they look to have solid relationships with quality agents to ensure they are not being adversely selected against.

ERIE has no bank-owned or bank-affiliated agencies and requires active principal agent involvement in the agency. Most of their agency sales are intra-family and the company prefers for the agency to have a perpetuation plan in mind in their business plan before an appointment is given.