In his role as head of CFC’s tech, media and IP division – known more colloquially as the ‘Department of the Innovation and Creative Industries’ – Michael Brunero (pictured) has the opportunity to rub shoulders with many of the established and upcoming brands looking to make our lives easier or more entertaining. It’s a rewarding experience, he said, to support innovative and creative businesses, and to watch them evolve into household names in the tech and entertainment world.
It’s a role that has only become most interesting in a post-lockdown landscape as the sheer amount of content and variety of content platforms continues to accelerate – and new technologies spring up as quickly as users are willing to embrace them. That has been reflected in the amount of business the team is seeing at the moment, he said, and he’s never seen quite the same level of new businesses starting up at the same time.
“I definitely feel when the world all fell apart, the world of tech and media was a nice place to be,” he said. “We did not have any time to be bored because the submissions just kept coming in, everyone was coming up with a new idea, trying to just react to what the new world was looking like. And those businesses will survive going forward because we’ve changed the way we interact and how we work together.”
Given the wealth of innovations happening in the tech and media sectors – and the role IP plays in grounding both – the focus for CFC has been keeping one step ahead of the solutions and support that will be required by these firms going forward. This was the thought process behind CFC’s revamp of its tech and media insurance policy wordings – a move designed to optimise the coverage of the full range of the exposures faced by these companies.
“We’re trying to look at the tech companies of today through the eyes of today,” Brunero said. “I think that, typically, as an industry, we tend to sometimes be a little bit slow-moving and to adopt policies in a slow fashion. If you look at the original tech policy, for example, it was really developed in the 80s and 90s.
“And so, [we accepted] that technology is evolving and that if we’re going to continue to do our job as an industry in these emerging sectors, we need to evolve too. People always talk about innovating… but what we started to realise when we were looking at the way policies were done is that they were A, quite complicated for businesses and B, not really reflective of what modern businesses look like.”
The tech companies of the 80s and 90s look very different to tech companies today, he said, and so it stands to reason they are dealing with different challenges and require different support. It’s just not the same world anymore and so the task the team at CFC set itself was to do a deep-dive into the types of tech businesses around today, examining their risk exposures and the policies needed to deal with them.
“What we started to notice was that the policies developed some 20 years ago were really composite policies that were trying to deal with much more simplistic businesses,” he said. “We [know] that a tech company is now more complicated - it has hardware, it may have software, it may be providing advice, it may be doing manual work.
“All these things are typically covered under different policies but, from a tech company’s perspective, that’s just what they do, they’re not worried about which policy it’s going into. So, we tried to think about all these exposures and work them in together to make it a little bit more simplistic for them to understand.”
The entrepreneurs behind tech and media companies are innovative people with an eye fixed on the horizon and so they expect relevant and timely solutions from their partners, including their insurance partners. Technology is so complex already, he said, and CFC embraces its role in making sure the insurance aspect of this is not unnecessarily complicated. Technology is needed to propel society forward and it’s in nobody’s interest to have complicated insurance policies slowing down the route to market.
“Particularly for the [smaller start-ups], they’re starting up these new businesses and trying to come up with the next big, great idea to make us all entertained or efficient,” he said. “Our aim is to target those businesses and say – ‘here’s a one-stop solution. You don’t have to worry about what product or what service, whether you’re causing financial loss or bodily injury or property damage. Whatever you do for a living, we’re going to cover so you can get on doing what you do, which is hopefully make our lives a lot more exciting’.”
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It is to be expected that when you’re looking to make a break with tradition and do something differently, you may meet resistance but Brunero noted that his team had been pleasantly surprised by the reaction of brokers to the policy revamp. Of course, the reaction does make sense, he said, considering that most brokers are not tech specialists themselves and the update allows them to better understand what’s on offer for their clients.
Now brokers can be less concerned about having to understand the complicated dynamics of the policy, making it a lot easier for them to communicate the proposition to their clients. The positive reaction from brokers to the changes gives him great faith in the industry itself, he said, as it really highlights how much more open people are now to doing and trying new things.
It has been very encouraging to see the broking networks moving forward with innovative ideas and a key area of focus for Brunero and his team is on continuing to ensure CFC’s broker network and clients fully understand the exposures of very modern businesses and how everybody can work together to cover them effectively. Products like intellectual property and technology can sound quite intimidating, he said, and it’s CFC’s job to demystify these classes of business to the benefit of all involved.
“Going forward, it’s about making it easier for people to transact and protect,” he said. “I’m a big believer in start-ups, I think these guys are coming up with fantastic ideas. But it’s making sure that these ideas are making their way down that supply chain. I never know what’s going to come across my desk but having a holistic proposition for what we do makes that a little bit easier…
“That’s where we’re focusing our energies – on really demystifying these classes of business and working with tech, media and IP as a holistic proposition. Because we always say in our department, ‘it can fit somewhere’. And often it’s not that clear at first but as you start to understand it, [you recognise] these types of businesses will fit somewhere in the realm of what we do.”
