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How can brokers help their business clients maximise protection against the myriad accident and health risks their travelling employees face?
Workers are becoming increasingly mobile, travelling to unfamiliar countries and territories where they're confronted by a variety of dangers, some of which – including the growing threat of terrorism – represent evolving risks. In that context, the need for businesses with travelling workforces to have comprehensive accident and health insurance coverage has become more important than ever.
But as is the case with many kinds of insurance exposures, much can be done to reduce the impact of any incidents that occur and to prevent losses altogether. There are many services available today that offer businesses and their employees greater protection against A&H risks. In February, XL Catlin launched Protect and Assist, its first move into the accident and health space in Australia. It’s a product that focuses specifically on assisting businesses to meet their duty of care to employees.
Protecting your greatest asset
Patrick Corbett, XL Catlin’s global head of life, accident and health, emphasises the need for employers to ensure proper attention is paid to people risk management.
“If you go to any CEO and ask her or him, ‘What’s your most important asset?’, they generally are going to say their people,” Corbett says. “There’s been a lot of focus over the last 20 years around risk management in organisations, but really around two things – one, their physical assets, and second, their liabilities – but not a lot around what they consider to be their most important asset, which is their people.”
Nicole Yates, XL Catlin’s head of accident and health for Australia, similarly believes businesses could be more proactive around managing people risk and adopting strategies to assist in preventing loss, as well as in educating employees about their A&H risks.
“I think overall, from an insurance perspective, [businesses are] well placed and have the adequate level of insurance,” she says, “but in terms of delivering their duty of care, I think that they can look at their practices and procedures and policies … to deliver and exceed that duty of care to their staff.”
Corbett says a major part of the value proposition for Protect and Assist is service-led. In addition to offering personal accident and business travel insurance, the product includes access to support and response services, which aim not only to help insureds when things go wrong, but also to reduce and prevent loss or harm before they travel. According to Corbett, today’s evolving risk landscape makes these types of services crucial.
“The services, especially around crisis management, are becoming more and more important,” he says. “We partner with [the crisis management] team internally and then with service providers externally to provide a suite of services and products that meet those needs … We’ve taken a number of service providers [that are] market leaders in the areas where they provide their services and put it all together to package it for clients.”
One of the issues XL Catlin is devoting a great deal of attention to is wellness.
“Some of the covers in our products are around psychological first aid, around the post-traumatic response in a post-traumatic stress situation, and getting in front of the challenge that the insured’s facing,” Yates says. “A lot of the time, if you can get them help early on, then they won’t suffer from the incident as much as they would have otherwise."
Travel risk management
Included in XL Catlin’s Protect and Assist offering is assistance for companies in creating a travel risk management policy, a document that should include both proactive and reactive plans and procedures. Corbett says the implementation of a travel risk management policy should be viewed as essential for businesses with mobile employees.
“I think a travel risk management policy is absolutely critical,” he says. “You’d be surprised how many organisations, even some large organisations, don’t have that sort of policy in place.”
Travel tracking tools can also be useful in an employer’s efforts to discharge their duty of care.
"If there is a natural disaster or a terrorism event in some location," Corbett says, “whether you’re the risk manager, HR manager [or] CEO, you're able to quickly find out who's in that area, what they are doing, what their contract numbers are, [and] be able to push out some alerts [and] some communication to ask, 'Are you all right?'"
Yates stresses the need for businesses to focus on travel preparedness “I think a lot of times, they have a travel policy in place, but it doesn’t go as far as it could around preparing travellers for the areas that they’re travelling to,” she explains. “Are there any diseases that are prevalent? Are there any preventative strategies? And if they do get struck down with something over there, how do they treat it? What areas should they avoid, and what are the local contacts in an emergency?”
Yates says it’s also important to ensure employees appreciate simple matters such as not travelling alone at night and not using ATMs unless located in public places. “People need to be prepared with the education and some of the skills to avoid getting into bad circumstances.”
Keeping the conversation going
On the insurance side, as businesses change shape, it’s crucial brokers are across any developments that may necessitate an update to a client’s coverage. Yates says brokers should encourage regular and ongoing communication with their insureds around the details of their operations.
“Things that [brokers] should be aware of are: [Are clients’ employees] doing any non-scheduled flying that they haven’t declared? Are they going into disturbed areas, which requires quite a specifi c and tailored approach? Are they changing their business approach? Are they a manufacturing firm that’s going into sales, or a services to mining fi rm that’s going into a new area? The business activities are important.”
Corbett concurs. “Sometimes there’s a shift in travel patterns – maybe it’s a new business opportunity or an M&A situation – where all of a sudden, what was there before changes radically,” he says. “I don’t think the client necessarily recognises the additional risks that brings with it, and so a good broker will prod those areas a little bit with their clients to really understand that so they’re able to help them with the people risk management element of that – and, of course, the products and services that the likes of ourselves and others are able to bring to mitigate that risk.”
While it’s one thing for an employer to secure accident and health coverage that provides employees with access to a range of beneficial services, it’s another to ensure that the employees actually understand the nature of those services and the fact that they are available.
“It’s one thing to have a really expansive proposition, both from an indemnity perspective and a service perspective, but if no one uses the services you’re providing, then no one’s getting the benefit out of it,” Yates says. “So it is very much about a communication message from the broker to the insured, and from the insured to their employees, because that’s how we can prevent some of these losses from occurring.”
