Arteva Funding, a firm that specialises in insurance premium funding and business loans recently changed its approach to conferences. The change suggests a strong commitment to the “E” in Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG).
“We no longer do promotional giveaways of physical items,” said CEO Daniel Gronert.
If more firms follow Arteva’s lead, the days of industry conferences giving away plastic pens, T-shirts, bags, stickers, fridge magnets, stress balls and reems of publicity material - could be numbered.
Gronert said they were spending several thousand dollars annually on these items so the brokers receiving them could remember his company for 30 seconds and then likely throw them away.
“Now we actually turn up at conferences and we thank any brokers that come to our booth and tell them that we’ve donated the equivalent amount of money to a charitable partner that we would have typically given them in throwaway items in the past,” he said.
The rules are bent for E-gift cards.
“But what’s amazing is we’ve actually had incidences at recent conferences where brokers who have won those E-cards worth $200 have asked if they can donate it back to one of our charities because they love what we’re doing in this space,” said Gronert.
Arteva is marking one year since adopting an ESG policy.
Gronert said even this change has “flipped the cards” and the “whole mindset around why we are doing this?” and even “Why are we here?”
“So that’s just a little thing that we’re doing,” he said. IB was reminded of that quote about a butterfly flapping its wings.
Not every insurance industry business would find it easy to make even this small change. However, Arteva also appears to have significantly refocused its business.
Insurance Business suggested to the firm’s marketing and ESG director, Sally Richardson (pictured above), who stepped into the ESG role last year, that the prospect of taking charge of ESG implementation across the company must have been intimidating?
“I put my hand up for it when Daniel first introduced the idea,” she said. “Surprisingly, it didn’t intimidate me and there’s always assistance if you need it to educate yourself.”
She said she did embark on “rapid upskilling” in some areas but her passion for the job helped her meet this challenge.
“When ESG was introduced to us, what we realized is we were already doing a lot of initiatives in our business that didn’t actually sit under a proper ESG framework,” said Richardson.
Given that many of these initiatives were within the scope of her current duties, she said it made sense for her to formally take on ESG responsibilities.
“It’s the favourite part of my role now,” said Richardson. “When you talk to employees they’re all over ESG initiatives and knowing that we are passionate about it and we’re enacting some change is something that they’re all really proud of.”
IB suggested to Gronert that, as a financial services business, it’s easier for Arteva to adopt an ESG policy. After all, it doesn’t have the same heavy ESG challenges or burden of responsibility as an energy firm directly involved with dirty fossil fuels.
“Because we’re a finance company, a lender, we’re perhaps seen as a little bit distant,” he said. “We wanted to flip that on its head and take a proactive approach to say, ‘we might be a finance company but we actually do care about the environment in which we work, the people that we transact with and the wider community in which we exist’.”
He also said that Arteva’s relationship with insurance brokers who find coverages for companies with dirty fossil fuel footprints does bring his firm another layer of ESG responsibility.
“We do have an ability to educate those brokers on how they can then educate their clients so that’s where we see our first step on this journey,” said Gronert. “If a broker is never having that conversation, then ultimately that client is never going to change their behaviour.”
The CEO said he hopes that his firm can educate brokers with real life examples and ideas about ways of approaching their clients that will enable them to have “a positive impact” in the longer term.
“We feel that we can start to embed that change quite quickly,” said Gronert. “Realistically, those dirtier clients will be caught by legislation sooner rather than later and they’ll have their own reporting they’ll have to meet due to legislation.”
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