This article was produced in partnership with Falvey Insurance Group.
Falvey Insurance Group is calling all its company ships, flying different flags, into home port.
The company is bringing its several different insurance titles under the Falvey name.
“Falvey Insurance Group is really one major company with many solutions,” said Jack Falvey (pictured top left), COO of Falvey Insurance Group. “Historically, people have known the Falvey Cargo brand, they’ve known the Safe Harbor Vessel Pollution Insurance, or Falvey Shippers Insurance, and they’ve known them and interacted with them independently.
“We, as a company, have spent time and energy on the marketing and communications side on dividing ourselves among these MGAs,” said Megan Bell (pictured top right), Falvey’s director of marketing. With everyone coming under the Falvey flag now, “we’re fully focused on what the strengths are as one team.”
She had a special message for their broker partners, that it will still be the “same kind of seamless experience,” with industry-leading technology, world-class customer service, and specialized underwriting experience.
At the start of 2023, the company had about seven different operating units. Falvey has been involved in sales meetings where a client has been asked who they underwrite their vessel pollution business with. Their reply? Safe Harbor Pollution, not knowing that that company was owned by Falvey.
“All of them have had different names, different logos, different marketing messages over the past that we’ve tailored specifically to that niche market,” Falvey said. “We were a niche player in those specialty classes, and now we’re trying to bring them all under one umbrella.”
The idea of bringing everyone back home began in 2021.
“It began with a conversation about the website,” said Bell, and the realization that “it would be so much simpler to understand if we were just marketing these products as our own.”
They spoke to some long-time employees, some of whom, understandably, had a deep connection to their own particular brand.
“They’ve only known themselves as one of our MGAs and not part of the Falvey Insurance Group necessarily,” said Bell. “It was taking the time to make sure everybody was on board and understood the implications of the changes, and that everybody was comfortable and in support.”
In the summer of 2022, the plans were unveiled to the company staff.
“It was at that point that we really felt like everybody was buying in and understood,” she said.
Since the company is “growing so much and so fast, this is just something that we need to do.”
Falvey pointed out that the group is a family-owned company, and that since the plan was announced, “our cross-selling has dramatically improved.”
What got this all started was a conversation about the company website, so it is only fitting that the story culminate in the company website’s relaunch.
“The website’s going to have a lot more information about our products,” said Bell. “There’s a whole lot we offer…so it’s our solutions rather than those brand names that were there before. It will be hopefully a lot easier for brokers to just get a really simple understanding of our product catalogue.”
It will also help with online searches to help people find Falvey products more quickly, looking for product type rather than brand name.
“Our pages are a lot more simple,” she said. “Another thing that we’re doing with our site is really trying to push people to our software. So most points of calls to action are telling people to go to our system. We’ve created great online systems that allow brokers and clients and partners to interact with us and do some of the processes and actions in the normal lifecycle of an insurance product directly.”
For many years the company’s marine cargo policies were its “bread and butter,” according to Bell, before branching into shipping insurance for high volume, overland shipping, and vessel pollution with an obvious marine tie-in.
“But then we started to realize that if we’re going to stay within our niche, there’s so many more coverages that we can find, like transportation and logistics liability and our new wholesale division offers coverage that are also complimentary, that we don’t necessarily have an MGA solution for, we can still help our brokers find that and be the specialist for it,” said Bell. “I think that’s the other strength is we’re remaining in our knowledge space. We’re going to be the authority on this type of coverage.”
Falvey noted that as one of the largest cargo insurers in the US, it has been dealing with the supply chain crisis of the late pandemic era, when “everybody went online shopping,” and ports were clogged, they have seen it all. Ditto with the company’s title as the largest vessel pollution insurer in America, dealing with everything from drought to flooding along the Mississippi River.
“You see a massive demand coming through on those and being able to work with great companies that are on the ground, interacting in real time, is a fascinating space for us to be in and that’s why we’re so passionate,” said Falvey.
