Stand Underwriting, a new agency, has entered the market with a novel product for brokers in the financial lines market. The Brisbane-based underwriter said its Balance Sheet Protection (BSP) coverage is the first online insurance product of its kind to offer statutory liability, D&O and other protections under the same policy.
“It’s a new take on a familiar concept,” said Jon Wood (pictured above), Stand’s business development specialist. Stand is offering BSP online and also face-to-face.
Wood said that financial lines offerings are usually packaged together under management liability but that can result in slimmed down coverage for an SME market.
“We wanted to change that and offer the same coverage to both corporate and SME clients. Rather than focus on directors and officers protection, our key focus is on statutory liability which is a real risk for all companies regardless of their size,” he said.
Scott Robertson (pictured below), Stand’s development underwriter, said BSP is a response to both increasing government regulation and the hard statutory liability market.
“Over the past decade the breadth of cover offered, and limits of liability, have shrunk considerably. BSP steps into the market with a flexible appetite, high limits of liability and a broad level of cover,” he said.
Wood said the new online product also aims to offer speed and efficiencies in a market still using “quite traditional” underwriting processes where many insurers review individual submissions offline and then offer a quote days later.
“We wanted to shake that up and our statutory liability can be quoted online in minutes,” he said.
Robertson said a main objective was to introduce BSP via a convenient, intelligent and flexible broker interface and online quoting platform.
“It was a challenge in terms of initial set-up, but the result has been well worth it. Stand’s Unified system gives brokers a fast and easy system to operate and for the back-end operations it provides a level of flexibility to accommodate the variety of curve balls thrown our way,” he said.
Wood said special wordings in their BSP offering bring in “extra covers.”
“Our standard offering provides rarely available protections, such as for enforceable undertakings,” he said.
Wood explained that alternative offerings in the market would generally require the customer to buy a couple of policies and deal with more than one underwriter to get the same coverage.
“Also, you might have gaps between those policies when trying to get them all to match up. Whereas through a BSP policy, it’s all been designed with the coverage to dovetail together,” he said.
Wood described their offering as “broad” with a “broad appetite” and aimed at larger companies and higher risk occupations.
“We’ve got a pretty broad range remit from Liberty Specialty Markets so we’re not saying ‘no’ to anything, except for some volatile stuff like cryptos,” he said.
Wood included engineers, financial planners and the construction market as possible BSP customers.
The financial lines space, including areas like management liability and statutory liability, have suffered a hard market for a number of years.
In an interview late last year, Andrew McKenzie head of financial lines, northern region, for BMS Group in Australia told IB that the types of risks involved in this insurance space are multiple.
“Absolutely – and that can be against boards and directors of listed companies, that can be against law firms and accounting firms and property firms from a professional indemnity perspective. That can be in respect to cyber and a ransomware attack that shut down your systems,” he said.
McKenzie said it’s a very difficult field to judge risk in.
“So, it’s very specialist,” he said. “If you think about governments, legislators and regulators – they don’t even know how to regulate these people, so their risks are almost unknown or hard to profile and get a handle on even to regulate on a government level. So, imagine what it looks like at a risk level - you never know who or what they’re going to get sued by next.”
McKenzie said as the world and business have become more service industry based over the past 40 years, they’ve also become more litigious and more technology dependent. As a consequence, the risk landscape to protect businesses and their people has dramatically changed.
