Retailing no longer belongs to the High Street. The superhighway possibly, but not the High Street. The challenge for retailers as they manage new risks in the digital emporium, is to become confident in understanding unfamiliar but necessary forms of insurance such as cyber, data breach, EPL, and supply-chain extensions, as examples.
Many retailers have evolved into multi-channel suppliers, offering bricks-and-mortar outlets through to dedicated white label set ups for branded sales through complex e-commerce web sites. In effect many retailers are really technology businesses shipping products of one sort or another. The insurance must then tilt towards the professional negligence risks inherent within the performance obligations entered into with the b2b white label customer. Risks as diverse as loss of income from site down time, to reputational damage, through to contingent liability for defective products are all possible exposures threatening the balance sheet. This multiplex of risks requires expert broking advice.
Information
Product Liability
Brand Protection
Supply Chain Protection
Cash
Fraud & External Crime
Risk Mitigation
Risk solutions are not all about insurance or loss control – indeed the vital “DNA” of the business may be acceptance of an unmitigated and uninsured risk.
Other risks can be easily controlled with a little work and assistance – thus reducing insurance cost, or avoiding the need for insurance at all.
Insurance is just a means of transferring unmitigated risk to another party. To keep insurance cost controlled mitigation opportunities should always be examined first.
Howard Pearson
There are a host of mitigation experts out there from cyber risk to fire engineering and we have created a network of these to bring the best to bear on your behalf. The more generic – like Health and Safety – can often be provided at a “no or low” cost due to insurers buying power.
Considerations:
- Health and Safety
- Fire Engineering
- Physical Security
- Cyber Risk Assessment
- Contract Reviews
- Continuity Plans
- Disaster Plans
- Supply Chain audits
- Pandemic Recovery plans
Contract Reviews
It is important to understand the extent to which liabilities entered into in commercial contracts are protected by insurance.
A key part of an insurance broker’s service is looking at insurance and indemnity clauses in contracts and providing informed comment.
Any commercially aware insurance broker will work with you to look at your contractual exposures
Paul Dickson
Innovation use a template approach to examine contract clauses, enabling the insured and uninsured exposures to be understood. This approach works just as well in both simple contracts like leases and more complex agreements like software supply or construction work
Considerations
- Leases
- Software contracts
- Service supply contracts
- Construction contracts
Claims Management
An insurance policy is only as good as the claim payment. Some claims however can be complex and protracted particularly liability claims.
Early notifications using the excellent claims notification services provided by insurers can often hugely reduce cost and disruption. On occasions however you will require guidance both from us as brokers, and from other professionals such as loss adjusters or lawyers.- and Innovation Broking have an arrangement with some tried and tested specialists to act on your behalf. For more information visit our claims page.
Unfortunately insurers have less expertise on the street to deal with complex claims than ever before – and this makes the role of the broker in delivering the correct expertise to you even more relevant.
Howard Pearson
It is possible to “pre book” the services of your own specialist loss adjuster working for you rather than for the insurers on larger property and interruption losses for a small additional charge. The current pressures many insurers are under to control claims costs makes this a very prudent purchase.
Commercial Insurance
The traditional risks of a business can normally be grouped under a “commercial insurance package” which combine a number of standard covers for assets, revenue interruption, cash, employers liability, public and product liability, and legal expenses. This grouping controls cost and enables very wide policy wordings and “add on covers” to be obtained easily and efficiently.
“In 40% of claims the business interruption interruption sum insured was too low by a factor of on average 45%”
Chartered Institute of Loss Adjuster’s Report, 2012
Whilst commercial policies are seen by many as straightforward they are far from this, often running to more than 100 pages of print. Particular attention needs to be paid to, inter alia:
- Basis of valuing assets
- Revenue sum insured calculation
- Supply chain dependencies
- Adequate business description
- Insurers standard security conditions
Employee Benefits
The correct Employee Benefit package is an integral part of the toolkit for every employer. Whilst a workplace pension offering is now a compulsory base layer in the UK, other benefits will vary in value to employees and cost to employer depending on the age of the workforce and the size of the pay roll.
Having run several larger businesses I see the issues as simple: what must we absolutely have, to win the battle to attract and retain staff in this increasingly competitive market; how do we buy this at a sustainable cost over time recognising the demographics of our workforce; how do we avoid “benefit creep” and the need to rein in benefits at a later stage.
Howard Pearson
In addition to the traditional risk benefits such as death in service, critical illness and income protection, there are a number of key areas to be examined for each employer. The most likely issues for modern employers are:
- when is it right to provide private medical insurance and should this extend to families.
- now that a baseline workplace pension is compulsory, how are the employer’s contributions correctly set to attract staff and be affordable
Considerations
- Workplace Pensions
- NEST
- Individual Pensions
- Company Pensions
- Death in Service
- Very High Earners
- International employers
- Income Protection
- Critical Illness
- Private Medical insurance
- Multinational Pooling
- Use of Trusts
- Cash Plans
- Dental Plans
- Key Man covers
