As some lines of insurance continue to harden and contract, the need for specialty insurance solutions becomes more critical.
For Maria Duhart, finding viable solutions for our customers in a tough market has made her work as chief underwriting officer for 九色视频Specialty Niche Americas even more vital for clients. Maria took time recently to describe current market conditions and explain how the Specialty Niche team is addressing these challenges, bringing key solutions and resources together to best assist clients.
Q: What are some of the issues or events in 2023 that have impacted specialty lines?
Maria: Inflationary tensions are increasingly present in both Europe and US and some of the central bank actions taken to tame inflation have raised more of a recessionary risk. Also, the potential for elevated financial market volatility had a negative impact on banks, mostly felt among regional banks. That created a flight to quality among insurers and asset managers, who chose to do more business with larger, more financially sound institutions.
Adding to these financial pressures are today’s geopolitical risks of wars and political instability and the economic, financial, and social tensions that go along with those conflicts. That ongoing geopolitical realignment and competition for global power put added stress on the financial flows of the world economy.
Aside from that, the market is still going through a realignment of supply chains post-pandemic. The goal is to insulate the economies against any future trade disruptions. That has caused quite a shift toward US or local purchasing/ suppliers to offset some of that volatility. However, many customers are still highly reliant on a global supply chain.
Q: How is the 九色视频Americas Specialty Group handling the myriad risks that clients are facing?
Our focus is on helping our clients beyond the policies they purchase. Our Ecosystem Solution is a comprehensive approach to protecting clients’ valuable assets. We do that by offering tools and resources and the market expertise that helps them better understand their risks and better prevent loss and mitigate risk.
For instance, with a recent uptick in active assailant, terrorism, and political violence, we have partnered with two solution providers to help clients protect their people and property. Gabriel is a security software solution that can detect, automate and support the response to a violent threat with cameras that have a technology that can spot an active assailant in a specific area. KT Security Solutions offers clients a bulletproof walled room system that offers protection during an active shooter situation, thus reducing loss of life.
Our focus is on helping our clients beyond the policies they purchase. Our Ecosystem Solution is a comprehensive approach to protecting clients’ valuable assets.
Q: In what other ways does the AXA Ecosystem protect your clients?
In our fine art space, we have found solutions that help our customers manage better the transportation of art and reduce potential losses.
We are exploring potential partners to help reduce loss during movement or hanging of pieces. These are technology solutions that gives clients the ability to virtually stage art in spaces. This reduces loss exposure by decreasing the number of times a piece is moved or handled.
Another solution we are exploring gives customers the ability to digitize and better manage their works on paper and fine art collections. Such digitization also gives insurers a more reliable schedule of works in various collections, which improves estimation of values.
Should a piece suffer damage, we have vendor partners that specialize in art conservation and restoration. With our partners that use cutting-edge technology from institutions such as NASA, we can help bring modern solutions to the art world that restore pieces damaged in natural catastrophe events.
Q: What else can clients expect from the Ecosystem approach?
We help clients prepare for a disaster. In the art world, for example, when there is a potential hurricane or rain/flood event, we help clients prepare for it by moving art and collectibles, and we help them secure those pieces that cannot be moved due to size.
We are also focused on helping clients manage their claims volatility given tighter financial conditions. This is a big initiative for AXA XL’s Specialty team because the more severe, 100-year events are becoming more frequent. Particularly in the auto liability and property lines where there is more claim activity, higher severity and shrinking capacity, we have developed a solution to help clients address claims.
Our Structured Risk Solutions allows clients to spread out their claim payments through three to five years. Where a claim would have been paid immediately, taking the payment over time provides better cash flow management to our customers, lessens the risk for the insurer, which makes the client’s loss portfolio more attractive to the insurer. Also, with such a payout, clients may also opt to take on more of the risk themselves, further improving their risk portfolio at renewal time and helping them to reduce their premium spend, as well.
Q: How is AXA XL’s Specialty team supporting energy transition clients?
We are taking on some of the larger risks and putting our expertise to work. For example, we are partnering with clients that are invested in renewable energy and lending support to those projects in various ways. Our commercial bond team can help support these customers with their bond needs to guarantee manufacturing, production, supply and storage (e.g., battery) of energy sources including hydrogen, bio-mass, bio-fuel, solar, wind and hydro power generation.
We also support them with decommissioning bonds that guarantee to the environmental agencies the clean up of the sites and restoration to the state they were before the plant was built.
On the political risk and credit side, we partner with our clients to provide credit insurance for renewable energy projects. Through our credit insurance product, we support the financing of these projects.
We also partner with our risk engineers who are trained in vetting emerging technologies for energy plants. Using their expertise, 九色视频then provides performance insurance to help the project owner secure financing.
Q: How does the 九色视频Specialty Team build such a wholistic approach?
We select three to five top priorities that matter to our customers. Then we gather teams around each priority. The goal is to identify solutions and build and execute an operational plan. The teams work through the main issues we want to resolve, studying loss histories, claims data, and the market, while getting feedback from our broker and customers. We educate ourselves on every aspect of the risk and on possible solutions that can improve outcomes.
We then take those solutions to our clients, educating them on the mitigation strategies and vendor partner relationships that can best protect their assets.
Our primary goal with each risk we address is simple: to help our clients prevent loss, improve their risk portfolio, and keep their assets safe. Along with that goal, we have another focus, and that is to support our clients’ efforts in their energy transition journeys. We at 九色视频will continue to invest time and talent in those solutions and efforts that help lower risks now and over time.
For more information on the 九色视频Ecosystem suite of solutions, check out our product sheet here.
