By Matt Pini, Managing Director, Consilium Broking.
Ever sat in your clients offices ahead of a renewal meeting, rehearsing your lines on a ‘hard market’, ‘underwriting losses’ or ‘increases being out of your control’?
Whilst controlling the market rates would be a nice position to be in, the one thing you can control is keeping your client informed on potential increases in renewal premium throughout the year. This will allow them to budget accordingly.
For clients that have filed no claims that year, or even for several years, it can be especially frustrating for them to keep finding their insurance costs rising.
At a time when many companies are seeing all kinds of costs throughout their business increase for a myriad of different reasons, CEOs and CFOs are studying ever more closely where there is unnecessary expense.
It’s fundamental that brokers explain to their clients why premium rates have risen in the past few years, so the client can be retained, without sacrificing coverage levels, and accepting the risk of being underinsured.
As has been well documented, we are now in a hard market, and while the rate of price rises is showing signs of slowing, rises are continuing all the same.
Making the client understand why this is happening is all down to effective communications.
A core job of every great retail insurance broker must be to keep the client’s risk manager, or other insurance buyer, fully up to date on the ever-changing dynamics in the insurance market.
We recommend contacting the client at least three months in advance of the renewal date, not only to start the process of information gathering, but to fully brief the client on what has happened in the wider insurance market in the past year, and how it might affect premiums.
However, to ensure the client is fully prepared, brokers should be doing all they can to stay in regular contact throughout the year, keeping them abreast of changing market conditions as they happen.
It’s important that the person responsible for buying insurance in a company is able to justify to business leaders why insurance costs have risen, and explain why these constitute necessary additional expenditure.
A broker can assist with this in a number of ways, for example helping to put together clear presentations, or finding a way for the underwriter producing the terms and conditions to speak directly to the company’s decision makers, and explain the price rises first hand.
Facilitating a discussion between underwriter and client may also lead to a fuller discussion around what actions the client could take to improve their risk profile, and reduce the premium in this way.
At Consilium, as well as placing your specialist risk into the London market, we strive to help our broking partners retain their clients. We pride ourselves on being accessible, and will help in any way we can, so your client understands the reasons behind any premium price rises.
Matt Pini is the Managing Director of Consilium Broking, responsible for all non-motor wholesale business.
Talk to Matt, or find the best person to discuss your specialist risk you need placing, by visiting our Team page here https://consiliumbroking.com/our-people
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