First Notice of Loss
The moment a claim is first reported. NAIC model regulation calls it notification of claim and starts an acknowledgment clock from it, whatever took the report.
First notice of loss, usually shortened to FNOL, is the industry name for the first report of a claim, and regulation uses a plainer term for the same event. The NAIC’s property and casualty claims regulation defines notification of claim as any notification, written or by another means the policy accepts, that “reasonably apprises the insurer of the facts pertinent to a claim.” Nothing in that definition turns on a form being filled in correctly, which is the first thing to know about automated intake: a message that conveys the facts is notice whether or not the system recognized it as one.
A set of clocks starts running from that moment, and the model regulation is where they are written down. An insurer must acknowledge receipt within fifteen days unless it pays inside that window, must reply within fifteen days to other communications that reasonably suggest a response is expected, and must promptly supply claim forms and reasonable assistance. Acknowledgment by means other than writing has to be noted and dated in the claim file. One clause deserves particular attention when a bot or a portal sits in front of the carrier: notification given to an agent of an insurer is notification to the insurer. States adopt this text with variations, so check the enacted version, but the shape is consistent.
FNOL is now the most automated step in the claims chain, with conversational systems taking the report, extracting the facts, opening the file, and routing it. One carrier reports taking 96 percent of first notices without human intervention, which concentrates two risks at a single point: the timestamp that starts every downstream deadline is machine-generated, and any fact the intake system misheard or silently normalized enters the file as though the claimant had said it. Preserving what the customer actually said, next to what the system recorded, is what makes the rest of the file reconstructable. The duties that run from this point sit in the Unfair Claims Settlement Practices Act and its companion regulation.