Today's transportation industry is looking for choice and selection when it comes to insurance. By forming strategic partnerships, one insurer has managed to provide this to its clients.
Video transcript below:
Reporter: Today's transportation industry is looking for choice and selection when it comes to insurance. By forming strategic partnerships, one insurer has managed to provide this to its transportation clients.
Angelique Magi, Vice President, Transportation & Strategic Initiatives,
The Guarantee Company of North America
Angelique Magi: The transportation customer today is being inundated by any number of sales approaches, whether it ranges from being able to provide safety consultancy or the next best technology to be able to help them reduce their fuel emissions, be able to give them a better return on investment. For us to be able to take the time and energy to be able to research any number of these particular vendors or services frees up time for the customer to do actually what they need to do, which is to be able to focus on moving freight and being able to generate revenue for the company.
Reporter: The Guarantee approached the problem by creating the Guarantee Transportation Solution.
Angelique Magi: The Guarantee brought together a team of experts throughout the transportation industry in Canada. This was not only as far as the executive management team, but it also was dealing with seasoned specialized underwriters, claims handlers and also litigation specialists that deal with this type of insurance product throughout
Canada. We didn’t want to create a product that was one size fits all.
We wanted to be able to take the best of what we have seen in the industry, not only from an insurance perspective would also from a safety management perspective, from a claims handling perspective, but more importantly on how to interact with the customer and identify the customer’s needs.
That brought us to the methodology of dealing with strategic partnerships, rather than try to be able to create everything within the guarantee that would take time, money and resources away from our focus on the customer, we looked to the transportation industry to be able to reach out to those vendors and third party providers that can service our customers’ business needs.
Reporter: Sure insurers know the value of forming strategic partnerships, but how specifically can they create such partnerships with their clients?
Angelique Magi: Ideally when bringing in strategic partners you want to be able to demonstrate to the industry that you are serving, in this case the transportation industry that we have a dedication to what their needs are in the marketplace, not just from an insurance perspective but specifically from what is going to matter to their business. By doing this and bringing in the right partners, we are actually creating competitive advantages for our particular customers as well as working to make them aware of emerging issues that can impact their bottom line.
Reporter: Transportation has undergone a transformation in the last decade. What is on the horizon in the years to come?
Angelique Magi: The transportation is segment specific, not the insurance side of it but the overall sector. As the Canadian economy improves, as the dollar lowers our Canadian trucking customers are going to be flourishing again. So we need to be aware as to what those issues are going to be going forward for them. Our trade barrier with the United States throws up a couple of hiccups every once in a while for our customers. So we have to be on top of those issues of course, but then there are a number of issues regarding legislation, whether it be from the auto insurance perspective on whether it be from a road maintenance perspective, all of those impact our customers.
The beauty of the structure with GTS is as an emerging issue as presented to us either from our broker partners or from the provincial or national trucking associations that we are members of, we are able to create not just an insurance product as it relates to that particular issue, but reach out to a strategic partner to create a solution for our customer and provide them with access to those particular partners.
