How to build resilient risk-management solutions for clients

Understanding your clients’ global risk profile, the challenges they face and approach to managing their total cost of risk is an essential element of an effective international program. When you help clients build a resilient risk management solution, it underscores your commitment to them. Zurich’s Risk Engineering services can help you achieve this, by supporting your client’s in the delivery of their risk management strategy.

Based on their experience and industry expertise, Risk Engineering can produce valuable insights for your clients and for their business. When you understand a business’ risks, it can foster more in-depth discussions with clients, and help you make more informed decisions on effective ways to deploy their risk management budget, with the ultimate aim of reducing their total cost of risk.

Delivering these services offers an excellent opportunity to solidify and deepen your client relationships, but the challenge can be providing these services as widely and consistently as you would like.

For instance, do you have sufficient risk engineering resources to service all of the locations where your clients are based? Can you offer knowledge and experience across the multiple industries your clients operate in? Do you have the capability to assist with the wide risk spectrum your clients face? Do you fully understand local regulatory requirements, legislation and cultural issues? Although you can work with local independent specialists, how can you be sure their risk assessments are being carried out consistently?

This is where Zurich can help. Zurich Risk Engineering is dedicated to the systematic identification, assessment and improvement of risk, by providing risk insights to help our customers understand and protect themselves from risk. Our Risk Engineering services offer a way to collaborate with your own loss control services to help create new opportunities for business and strengthen existing relationships with mutual clients. What we can do:

• We can work jointly with you and your clients to provide meaningful insights based on our industry experience, helping address their risks and prevent losses.
  
  
• Our multi-line approach – offering coverage for property, liability, motor fleet, marine, safety, business resilience and supply chain – is distinctive in the market and can help produce deeper and more complex insights and assessments.
  
  
• With your client’s permission, we can give you online access to their risk assessment exposure data and real time status updates on their risk improvement implementation activity – increasing transparency, providing valuable insights and helping you visualize, understand and address the risks they face.
  
  
• We are able to give you and your clients high-quality, consistent service around the world. We have 800 risk professionals working in over 40 countries. All of them undergo extensive, ongoing and up-to-date training.
  
  
• We apply robust risk assessment methodology with consistent risk grading criteria globally. By assigning values to a variety of risk factors, each with appropriate weightings, we are able to provide an overall risk grade across each customer’s portfolio. The consistency of our risk assessment grading methodology also allows us to benchmark a customer’s risk profile across their sites and also against industry and regional peers. This allows for informed decision making about where to prioritize risk management focus and budget spend,
  
  
• Our extensive global experience means you can feel confident that we can provide broad, international solutions that are aligned with local insurance laws and regulations, legislation, customs and culture.

The following case study shows how we’ve successfully worked with one broker to deliver a global Risk Engineering program to a multinational customer.

Case study

Zurich collaborated with the broker to handle the heavy workload in delivering a tailored Risk Engineering program for a multinational customer.

Zurich Risk Engineers visited the larger sites and the broker’s risk consultants visited the smaller locations. The broker’s client was happy with this approach but wanted all reports in the same format, with a consistent risk grading and all reports, data and Risk Improvement Actions (RIAs) available online.

To achieve this, Zurich provided training on its property fire grading, loss estimate methodology and RIA categorization to the broker’s consultants. We also provided ongoing support through a report review and audit process to meet underwriting requirements.

Templates were created for the broker’s consultants to use when collecting the information, which was then uploaded to a single management system, making it easy to run reports and give online access to the customer via the My Zurich portal. Now, with the Zurich Risk Advisor app, this can be achieved even more easily as brokers and clients can assess smaller locations using the same methodology and these self-risk assessments can be directly uploaded into My Zurich.

This data sits alongside the assessments carried out by Zurich risk engineers, so that everything is in one place and can be reviewed & analyzed together and then included in summary reports and benchmarking studies.

In addition to risk assessments, Zurich worked closely with the broker and the customer in other areas – helping with project reviews, updating the client’s loss prevention policy, business continuity planning and loss management investigation protocols – and continues to hold regular tripartite meetings to discuss how the program is running. Zurich is continually refining its processes to make them smoother and easier for all concerned.

William J. Porter, CPCU
Head of International Sales & Distribution
Zurich North America