How to meet the hard-to-place insurance challenge
In today’s toughening insurance market having a previous claim or claims in your history could disadvantage you considerably, especially if the costs were substantial.
We sometimes become complacent because if the insurance market is soft you might get away with a big claim without it affecting your premium. Well, that’s not the case at the moment ‒ and particularly if the claim involves loss of life.
Insurance underwriters are becoming increasingly picky about the risk they are prepared to take on, and some road freight operators with claims records may discover they are being excluded by insurers in the transport sector.
We are hearing from more and more operators that simply can’t place their insurance at an amount they can afford, and this can shut your business down.
Underwriters analyse risk by using mathematical formulas. Insurance brokers also use formulas to assess how we can ‘sell’ an operation’s risk to the market. Often it’s possible to achieve a positive result for hard to place operations.
Read Roz Shaw’s take on training and licensing development, here
It’s a combination of what an insurer knows and who they know. In the ‘what they know’ area, risk mitigation advice is as important as knowledge of available policies. What that means is the right advice and actions can help transport operators improve their risk profile.
How? The first step is to gather all the background information on your operation and scan it for positive factors that translate to more attractive risk. Your broker can guide you on the particular details that will help your case, you just need to provide the info.
Secondly you can get advice about the processes you can adopt to improve your safety profile. A site visit by the broker can help them to personalise their recommendations to your operation.
When it comes to the ‘who they know’ your brokers’ history in the transport sector and contacts in both the local and international markets will be key to their ability to shop around and to be creative in achieving a solution for your business’s insurance requirements. Innovative insurance solutions can be packaged from multiple sources to comprehensively cover your operation’s exposures. No business can afford insurance with gaps. It’s only a matter of time until these bite you.
If your operation is in the hard to place category, you need to find a broker with the capacity and connections to shop around, and who is flexible enough to tailor personalised policies that cover your operation’s needs
This can-do approach is part of our mindset at Gallagher, and we have developed an easy to follow process for our clients that enables us to turn around a quote for insurance cover for a hard to place business almost as fast as we would for an operation with a spotless risk profile.
That’s not too hard at all!
Roz Shaw is Head of Transport at international insurance broker Gallagher, and the former CEO of Hawkins Road Transport Pty Ltd.