Market meetings take risk managers beyond paperwork

SAN DIEGO — The checks-in-boxes and fill-in-the-blanks of an insurance application shouldn’t replace market meeting presentations for risk managers intent on showing underwriters their company’s unique risk profile, according to Heidi Horn, Middleville, Michigan-based risk management adviser at Hastings Point Solutions LLC.

“You can provide all that information through an insurance app and get a quote, no problem,” said Ms. Horn, who consults with companies that want to better communicate how they manage risk and presented during a session at Riskworld, the Risk & Insurance Management Society Inc.’s annual conference in San Diego.

“But as risk management professionals, is that really only what you do is fill out applications and collect the data and provide it to insurance? Are you compelled to tell them the rest of the story?” she said. “There are very few questions, if any questions, on those insurance applications that try to get at what your risk management and control practices are as an organization.”

Sharing a company’s risk can go beyond bullet points to include facility tours — she encourages risk managers to give presentations on site and to involve frontline professionals who can better explain the company’s practices – and photography and video, a trend that emerged during the pandemic.

A company’s story on risks and how they manage them can change over the course of a year, as companies experience losses or as new risks are presented, and another tip when crafting a presentation is to use historic applications as a guide for updating underwriters, she said. “I would look at last year’s application and compare the answers to this year’s application and identify the questions that had stark differences because that is definitely going to be a question from the underwriter.”