Special Interest Groups: Round-up of the Retail, Water and Charity SIGs.

Special Interest Groups (SIGs) at Airmic are on the up, with more and better attended meetings. Here is a sample of what was discussed in October.

Retail SIG

Chair – John Windsor, Marks & Spencer

Marsh gave a very interesting presentation on Cyber. Main points that came across were:

• Potential exposure is growing
• Uniformity of regulations is expected
• Adherence might be expected before regulations actually introduced
• Cover offered by each insurer varies
• Many UK retailers are considering buying Cyber cover, but few do so
• Usual range of insured limits is £5m to £10m
• Deductibles are increasing Other points to emerge from the meeting:

Market conditions

Some insurers are reconsidering their positions in certain classes, retracting or reducing their exposure. There is still plenty of capacity in Property and Casualty.

Claim cost allocation

Mixed bag as to whether members recharge costs to stores, subsidiaries, etc. Several make no recharge, others allocate a proportionate amount and some charge a fixed cost when a fault claim occurs. Similar story with premium allocation.

Claims handling

Mostly outsourced rather than handled by insurers. Some members handle all or part in-house and those in question are very happy with the results and have no issues about training or updating of knowledge. Satisfaction with third party claims handlers seems to vary greatly. It was agreed to benchmark before the next meeting.

Broker Fees

Large variance of fees paid to brokers. All members ask brokers to divulge any commissions. Charges being kept fairly level year-on-year.

Lifts

Some members are seeing whiplash claims from lift incidents. Generally, no statutory fault found. This may also raise some questions about servicing conducted by third parties?

Water SIG

Chair – Peter Robinson, Anglian Water

The Water SIG met on the 11th October for its autumn meeting and, as usual, was attended by a good spread of companies. The ‘closed’ AIRMIC session is always valued most by members as it allows open discussion on a range of topical issues, including the adoption of private sewers undertaken by water companies last October and the impact of this change; general liability claims arising and trends most waste water companies seeing increased volumes of sewer flooding due to the ‘healthy’ amount of rainfall. (Talk of drought is now a distant memory).

The group then moved on to hear 40-minute presentations, the first from Inter Risk Solutions, a company providing claim settlement without the ‘no win no fee’ solicitors involvement; companies using Inter Risk were seeing good savings and positive settlements achieved and were interested to see how inter Risk are promoting their service which can only benefit the whole claims industry.

This was followed by AXA providing an update on Cyber Risk insurance and the wider policy coverage and particularly the cover for infrastructure companies using telemetry control systems, which are vulnerable because of low grade security applied.

Willis then sponsored and ran the final session and provided some anonymous benchmarking information on claims and insurance purchasing trends across the industry.

Charity SIG

Report by Ashley Hepburn, Red Cross

The October meeting of the Charity SIG saw good attendance with 9 representatives from 7 charities. Group members have a variety of roles at their respective charities but all have responsibility for insurance. Discussions are always open and wide-ranging, and in October varied from the extent of formal/informal risk management required of attendees by their charity to the use of international assistance companies alongside Private Medical or Travel insurance. Other topics included volunteers and the impact of grey fleets on motor insurance, the necessity of “non-core” covers such as Crime or Employment Practices Liability, and the emerging fields of reputational risk and cyber liability.