Despite having found his route into insurance in what might be safely described as the “usual way”, falling into an insurance career hasn’t stopped Howard Lickens (pictured), executive chairman of the Clear Group, from enjoying and valuing all the experiences it has brought him. In a recent IB Talk podcast, Lickens discussed the early days of his career and emphasised how and why insurance is often under-appreciated.
“I think if you tell people that you’re in insurance, you hear two things,” he said. “One is some horror story about their motor or household insurance, which has gone up in price or whatever, none of which I can help with and haven’t been able to do for many years. But the other thing is this sort of belief that it is in some way normal not to get your claim paid.
“I was in a conversation only at the weekend and someone was talking about insurance as if it was a miracle if any claim ever gets paid. And I’ve been doing this for 30, 40 years or more. And I’m not sure if I could number on the fingers of two hands – because it would be fewer than that – the number of cases where valid insurance claims, in my view, don’t get paid.”
The bad stories are the ones which tend to get spread while the good stories about the public good done by insurance personnel often remain unspoken. What commercial brokers do, Lickens said, is deliver the intangible promise that is peace of mind and confidence to the customer. It is the role of commercial brokers to place the right insurance, but also to give people the confidence to go about their business with the understanding that their broker is behind them all the way.
“So, I don’t think that is properly understood by people,” he said, “[not] when there’s always a story somewhere about some travel insurance claim not being quite paid.”
