“I think the goal has always been to change the way insurance is done,” said Danial Cummins (pictured above), general manager of SafetyCulture Care Australia.
Insurance Business interviewed Cummins at his Sydney headquarters. IB was interested to find out how this firm with a focus on SMEs and insurance brokers has evolved since launching in March last year.
“We’re an underwriting agency, first and foremost,” he said. “But we’re using a different lens in risk management because we’re looking at the culture and behaviours of the people managing the risk and how we can help them run a better, safer business.”
He suggested that big opportunities lie in the SME space where, he said, 87% of the market is intermediated through brokers. SafetyCulture shares data and insight trends relating to an SME with the business’s broker.
Cummins said his firm is “continuing to evolve.”
“Today, we’ve got around 35 full-time team members,” he said. “By July, we’ll have 50 and we’ll really start to grow our US-based team in particular.”
IB asked if there’s one industry that stands out for reaping potential benefits from his firm’s novel blend of risk management, data and insurance?
Cummins was reluctant to single out a sector. “Choosing one particular area is like picking a favourite child,” he said. “But I think in hospitality we can really help and have an immediate impact.”
He said their offering to the hospitality sector includes temperature and humidity sensors.
“Which we’ll make available in our quote and bind platform,” said Cummins.
He said in food manufacturing, stock loss and deterioration are likely one of the largest sources of losses for business owners. This can be linked to machinery failures.
“We’ve seen that 37% of the claims from hospitality businesses are related to machinery breakdown and we know sensors are a key part of the solution if we want to reduce this,” said Cummins.
Some of the machines breaking down make coffee.
“Data has also been able to tell us that the quality of the water around Australia will drive how often your coffee machine should have a maintenance check,” he said.
Cummins said dirt in the water makes the machine’s parts work harder.
“The byproduct of all this [insight] is that things are less likely to go wrong,” he said. “So coffee machines will not break down and the café will not lose customers.”
The better maintained coffee machine, he said, will also likely be less costly to repair.
Fire risks in restaurants, said Cummins, can also be reduced.
“We can share information about what commonly goes wrong and what we know people are checking,” he said. “For example, 40% of fires in restaurants spread because there’s a lack of cleaning and maintenance.”
Tea towels, he said, are also linked to some restaurant fires.
“We’ve had a couple of fire claims where the combustion of a tea towel creates a fire,” said Cummins. “We actually talk about how you could try and prevent that and the steps you should put in place.”
Cummins said the SafetyCulture platform offers industry-specific checklists, training and risk management tools that deliver data and insights.
“Our concept is based on taking a proactive and risk-led approach to insurance: How we can help prevent claims from happening?” He said. “We’ve got a lot of data on issues, incidents and near misses captured within our platform.”
He said one challenge is sharing these insights and the anonymised, aggregated data “with the right people.” Cummins said that risk minded brokers fall into this category.
“They [brokers] need to know what could go wrong in that business,” he said. “Where we can help is by providing data and insights because it’s a really powerful way to add value.”
The SafetyCulture offering, he said, can do things “that we probably haven’t seen too much in the insurance space.”
At the firm’s Sydney office in Surry Hills, each floor has different rooms designed according to the business of a particular customer. For example, the Toyota room has the chassis of a car hanging from the ceiling, the COLES room is set up like a supermarket and the Rio Tinto room has hard hats on the walls.
The main picture with this article shows Cummins in the Transport NSW room.
Are you an insurance broker? What would help you to better risk manage your SME customers? Please tell us below
