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TACKLING SOARING TRUCKING INSURANCE? HOW IMPROVED RECRUITMENT, OPERATIONS AND
TELEMATICS CAN HELP

In commercial auto management, telematics can be a double-edged sword — but
would you rather go into battle unarmed?
By: David Agnew | September 8, 2024
Topics: Liability | Loss Control | Sept./Oct. 2024 Issue | Transportation



If you’re insuring a vehicle, you already know it’s bad: Premiums have been
accelerating upward for years, and things show no sign of reversing course
anytime soon.

“Almost every insurance carrier that operates in the commercial auto liability
space has seen dete­ri­orating results, so there’s been continual rate hikes to
try and manage profit­ability,” said Greg Stefan, SVP, risk control, Arch
Insurance Group.



Trucking fleets may be feeling it most, but every company that relies on
vehicles — whether employer- or employee-owned — is seeing its premiums rise.

“Commercial auto has gone up, on average, 10% [a year] for the last seven or
eight years,” said Rohan Malhotra, CEO and cofounder of Roadzen, an Insurtech
specializing in auto lines. “This is massive for small and medium-sized
companies, such as a trucking owner or a plumber who owns seven vehicles.”

Alongside rising premiums is a corresponding decline in capacity: “The capacity
is really challenging, because previously, you could get a reinsurer to take $10
million or $15 million of a line,” said Lisa Paul, chief strategy officer for
transportation at HUB International. “Nobody’s willing to take $15 million of a
line anymore. There are reinsurers that are limiting their participation to a
total of $10 million in a $200 million tower, and they want that $10 million in
different layers … So the layering of these casualty towers is very difficult
for large fleets.”

The result, Paul said, is that “the insurance marketplace has been under
tremendous financial pressure, with poor-performing auto rates driven by a
number of factors: the cost of parts, the complexity of how our vehicles are
built today and how they have to be repaired combined with tort liability issues
and nuclear verdict issues … and the connector to all of these sorts of things
is technology.”



And as is so often the case with problems caused by technology, only technology
can make it better.


DRIVING THE TREND

What has driven the commercial auto insurance sector to its current state? In a
word, claims. In two more words, frequency and costs.

Claim frequency began to climb dramatically in 2020. While auto fatalities do
not represent the entire picture, they may serve as a proxy for the overall
number of collisions taking place. After remaining stable at about 30,000 to
35,000 per year for over a decade, auto-related fatalities reached nearly 40,000
in 2021, representing a roughly 19% increase over 24 months, according to NHTSA
data.

Some of the longer-term rise in premiums can be attributed to traffic volume: In
2023, there were 24% more drivers on the road than there were in 2003, and
nearly 58% more than in 1983. (There’s also evidence that those drivers are
getting worse). And while more drivers mean more premiums paid, that increase in
volume may also be contributing to a higher rate of accidents per vehicle.

Just as significant are the costs of those claims. On the more benign side,
there’s general inflation, which has driven up the cost of everything from
cracked windshields to medical care for injured parties. According to the U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics, vehicle repair costs surged 23% from January 2022 to
January 2023.

“Garages and workshops are incredibly constrained for manpower and supply,”
Malhotra said, “and that is one of the biggest contributors to auto insurance
inflation.”

Greg Stefan, VP of risk control, Arch Insurance Group

Further, Stefan added, “if you rear-ended somebody 10 or 15 years ago, you paid
for a bumper. You rear-end somebody now, you’re paying for a bumper, for every
sensor, every camera. Everything is more expensive.” The vehicles themselves
have become much more complex and difficult to repair.

On the more pernicious side, commercial auto lines have proven particularly
susceptible to legal system abuse, especially cases of negligence in at-fault
accidents causing injury. While limited to the extreme end of the claims
spec­trum, these outsize nuclear awards — awards of $10 million or more — are
weighty enough to throw off the center of gravity for the entire sector.

“Nuclear verdicts are frankly what’s waking a lot of people up” to the strain on
com­mer­cial auto, Stefan said, “be­cause they mean you can go out of busi­ness.
There may not be enough insur­ance available to cover the damages.”

Anecdotally, legal system abuse has been an issue for auto insurers for years;
in July, a Rand social inflation report provided some hard data to back up those
suspicions. Among its findings: From 2017 to 2019, “awards for commercial
trucking … grew at nearly a 20% annual rate relative to a 2010-2017 baseline
period” — well ahead of all the other categories sur­veyed — and “social
inflation potentially caused commercial auto liability claim payments to be
roughly 14% (or $20 billion) higher between 2010 and 2019 than they would have
been otherwise.”



What typically characterizes these nuclear verdicts is the perception of
negligence.

“Sometimes, you can’t prevent an accident,” Stefan said, “but when negligence is
shown — negligence in hiring, negligence in retaining a driver, negligence in
taking corrective action, negligence in not screening their motor vehicle record
— that is where you may see punitive damages.”

Added Brian Jungeberg, vice president of the national transportation practice at
Risk Strategies, “I would venture to say that legal system abuse, especially in
certain venues, is adding 150 to 250% to awards.”

It’s a legal environment that’s prompting many insurers to settle if it will
avoid even a small chance that a claim will go nuclear at trial — including
cases where nobody believes the defendant is to blame.

“The idea of having to prove fault has been reduced,” said Donnacha Smyth, chief
underwriting officer for casualty, AXA XL. “You’ve just got to prove that
something happened, not necessarily a fault, and the jury is going to feel that
they need to award [whomever] they perceive the victim to be.”

Dire as this situation sounds, it’s not hopeless. In fact, the experts we spoke
to identified three main arenas of risk control in fleet management, ranging
from totally low-tech to cutting-edge.


TALENT SEARCH

For one, the trucking industry has been affected by the same talent short­age as
everyone else — perhaps more so, as young people are proving leery of trucking
due to its de­mand­ing hours and the possibility of technological disruption.

Brian Jungeberg, VP, national transportation practice, Risk Strategies

Meanwhile, especially post-pandemic, “e-commerce has generated far more demand
for the driving role, and there’s not enough talent there to fill it on a
consistent basis,” Jungeberg said. And while long-haul trucking is seen as a
career, rideshare driving and food delivery tend to attract more people who view
the job as a sideline, rather than a vocation.

“You have this vicious cycle of non-professional drivers, and that’s
exacerbating the losses and claims both in frequency and in severity,” Jungeberg
said. “Plaintiffs’ counsels are very quick to pick up on things like ‘This
driver worked at four other places and he was there for a month each time, and
then he showed up at your doorstep, but you hired him right away and didn’t do
any sort of safety training’ … It speaks to folks not having a culture of safety
and professionalism if they’re churning through drivers.”

But while driver screening and training may be taking a back seat, they’re both
straightforward ways to reduce accidents and avoid the appearance of negligence.



“Why are you only running a motor vehicle record once a year?” Stefan said. “You
run an initial MVR in January, then a driver might have a DUI in March, and you
don’t check them again until January. Why don’t we get proactive and use
technology to continuously monitor motor vehicle records? … I can implement
available technology and get an activity notification as soon as negative
activity hits the Department of Motor Vehicles or the court system.”


ORDER OF OPERATIONS

Easy-to-implement technologies can improve not only driver screening but also
the old-school activities surrounding onboarding, training and certification,
and performance feedback — all things a fleet manager can submit to underwriters
to demonstrate that they take safety seriously.

HUB International, for one, offers a platform called HUB Drive Online, which
operates independently from its brokerage arm and is designed to manage many of
the administrative tasks involved in fleet management.

For their part, underwriters have data that could prove useful to insureds’
operations: Fleet managers can use claims information about when and where
accidents occur to schedule drivers for different routes or times, avoiding the
most dangerous stretches of a journey.

“If you’re starting to analyze the number of losses on a certain road from point
A to point B, a deathtrap freeway area that’s poor, you can begin feeding that
information back into route planning,” Paul explained, which helps not only
fleet operators but their underwriters, too.

And while underwriters can pro­vide fleets with more granular risk data, fleets
can provide underwriters with more granular data about their movements.

Lisa Paul, chief strategy officer for transportation, HUB International

“Ten years ago, the best way to get true exposure information was transportation
sales or miles, and even getting the miles often wasn’t an easy piece,” Paul
said.

“From the insurance company perspective, it was about how many power units [a
client had] and the location where they’re generally driven. There was really no
verification of that. You could say ‘I have 100 power units in upstate New
Jersey,’ but in reality, those are driven on a daily basis in the heart of
downtown New York … So there was a foggy lens to real exposure, and as a result
of that, it was difficult, as an underwriter, to really analyze the risk
properly.

“Fleet owners want a fair shake; they want to pay based on their true exposure,”
Paul continued. “The old-fashioned insurance application as we knew it — give me
your units, tell me where you drive, give me your drivers list so I can run the
MVRs, and by the way, give me your loss runs — isn’t exactly cutting the mustard
for the insurance industry to define their underwriting practice and be able to
make money. They have to be able to parse their rates based on which fleet has
newer equipment, better drivers, better training, a better onboarding process,
and maybe even fewer miles than the other one.”

While gathering this volume of data was impossible in the past, “it’s not
aspirational anymore,” Paul said. “The technology is here. Insurance com­panies
are clamoring to figure it out.”

Jungeberg agreed: “I often think that insurers aren’t asking enough questions
and looking at the right things. Just raising rates can’t continue to happen.
We’ve been trying to make that answer work for 12 years, and clearly it hasn’t.”

Still, raw data doesn’t immediately resolve into an accurate reflection of risk
exposure on its own. “It’s hard to quantify safety culture,” Jungeberg said. “Do
you use a point system? How do you get that into [something insurers] can hand
to an actuary so it’s not just someone licking their finger and sticking it in
the air to see which way the breeze is blowing and making a judgment? That’s the
struggle.”

Real-time oversight of drivers’ qualifications and precise data on vehicles’
movements can create a fuller picture of risk, but one important piece remains:
what goes on behind the wheel.

Telematics holds enormous promise in improving driver safety and combating
spurious claims of negligence.


TELEMATICS FOR THE PEOPLE

While sensors and automation can increase repair costs, there is more automakers
could do to make these repairs cheaper — installing modular rather than
integrated sensors, for example, so that individual parts could be swapped out
and replaced or reused, rather than scrapping entire complex systems.

But even factoring in the higher cost of repair, driver-assisting tech­nologies
can represent a net gain if they prevent costly accidents.

“The benefits of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) cannot be
overstated,” said Donato Monaco, president of Northland Insurance, a
transportation-focused division of Travelers. “They help lower the frequency of
claims, as well as the severity, as a result of slower impact speeds in a
collision. Sometimes, they can even prevent collisions completely.”

While ADAS — which include lane-departure warnings, blind-spot detection,
collision avoidance and driver drowsiness detection, among other features — are
designed to improve driver behavior at the moment of a potential collision,
telematics can im­prove driver behavior over the longer term by producing data
and feedback on a driver’s actions.

Both technologies are improving at a rapid pace. Just a few years ago, ADAS and
telematics needed to be retrofit into vehicles, typically via a dongle plugged
into the vehicle diagnostics port. Today, many are built in — all Ford
commercial vehicles released since 2020, for instance, include an integrated
modem.

Rohan Malhotra, CEO and cofounder, Roadzen

“Now, 80% of all vehicles that are produced have inbuilt telematics
capabilities,” said Malhotra. “It’s growing very quickly at the moment, but new
vehicles only make up about 7 or 8% of the car park.”

A newer solution is phone-based apps. While these can’t typically access vehicle
information directly, they are able to monitor behaviors like hard braking, hard
turns and distracted driving.

“This is growing very, very quickly, because the friction of installation is way
lower than actually putting hardware inside the vehicle,” Malhotra said.

But the tech with the greatest po­ten­tial to reduce fleet ex­po­sure, Malhotra
said, is video tele­matics: “This is a dashcam or em­bedded camera inside the
vehicle. It can be a single-sided dashcam looking at the road or looking at the
driver, or a dual-sided dashcam that’s looking at both the road and the driver.
This is the most powerful form of telematics that exists because you get a lot
of context: How are other people on the road driving? Are you driving
within regulation?”

The catch: Typically, “the driver does not want to be tracked at all times,”
Malhotra said. The solution: “The way to pitch this is not as a surveillance
tool but as a companion on the road, helping them prevent accidents, coaching
them to be better — a driver’s buddy.”

In fact, the concept of long-term coaching offers enormous potential to improve
professional driving and avoid, if not all collisions, then at least the ones
most likely to go nuclear.

“This isn’t about penalizing drivers. It’s about rewarding positive driving
behavior,” Stefan said. “It’s developing driver scores so you can reward those
drivers. It’s also about identifying de­teri­o­ra­tion with a driver early on so
you can implement corrective action before the driver’s results prevent them
from being able to drive on your behalf.”

To make this kind of telematics program work over the long term requires
consistency. The investment in the technology is just the beginning; the ongoing
investment in its application will pay dividends.

“On the safe driving side, and creating a safety culture within an organization,
you’ve got to actually spend time with the data — almost in real time each day —
in order to capture things that are happening with drivers and correct them,”
Jungeberg said. “It’s a big lift. It’s extra work for somebody to do — your
driver manager, your fleet manager, whoever. But generally, if you’re doing it
in real time and the feedback gets out there in the driver population (as it
typically does within a company), then everybody’s paying far more attention to
it all the time.”

Gamification is one method of getting drivers on-side; by using clean driving
metrics as the basis for incentives, employees can see how pointers on their
driving habits benefit them directly.

This ultimately comes down to company culture, Jungeberg added: “Firms that have
very good experience with losses and claims typically have that safety culture,
that team built. The ones that struggle with their losses and claims are ones
that don’t have any culture at all.”


THE LOOK OF SUCCESS

The goal of all these improvements is, of course, to reduce the number of
accidents and resulting claims. But a certain element of risk is inevitable, and
as mentioned, juries may expect insurers to compensate the injured even in cases
where liability is in doubt.

In these cases, telematics can, at the very least, demonstrate to a jury that a
fleet operator was making a good-faith effort to maximize their drivers’ road
safety and avoid reasonable accusations of negligence.

Data backs this up. A 2023 study from the American Transportation Research
Institute indicated that dashcams, especially road-facing cameras, exonerate
commercial truckers more often than the reverse: In cases where road-facing
camera data is submitted, the driver of a commercial motor vehicle is exonerated
roughly 63% of the time and found at fault roughly 36% of the time.

Donato Monaco, president, Northland Insurance

“There has been some concern that cameras might be more damning in accidents,”
Monaco acknowledged. “However, we’ve found the opposite to be true. Video
footage has more often than not helped defend drivers. Video can be sent to
drivers at a collision site to help inform first responders as to what happened
and show fleet drivers might not be at fault. And, in cases where they are at
fault, it can actually help expedite the claims process, which can end up
lowering the cost of claims that would have been paid out anyway.”

So while telematics is proving to be a powerful weapon in the fight against
legal system abuse, it remains a double-edged sword, a benefit primarily to
those fleet owners who truly make the effort to minimize risky behaviors.

“My caution to our clients is that tele­matics are great — driver coaching is
great — but if you’re not consistently, proactively doing it and making some
really hard decisions, such as letting go of drivers who may be great drivers
that made one bad mistake, you’re actually helping the plaintiffs’ counsel build
the case against you, because all of that can end up being discoverable,”
Jungeberg explained.

If a driver is responsible for an accident, however, video evidence confirming
that is unlikely to be the deciding factor at trial.

“You’re in a much more positive position as an employer in using cameras and
tele­matics systems and having people to manage it, even if it shows that you
were at fault,” Stefan said. “Because instead of drawing a claim out for three
and a half years of litigation and multiple levels of attorney fees, you
recognize it. You settle it. You correct the situation. You address it, and you
move on. That generally ends up being less expensive than if it’s drawn out for
two or three years.”

Ideally, telematics data should pro­vide evidence that your drivers are driv­ing
well. But if it doesn’t, that’s information you’re better off having — assuming
you’re using that data as a training tool and not merely an exculpatory one. You
may be found liable for a given accident, but not for a dangerous pattern of
willful negligence.

“That becomes extremely meaningful,” Stefan said, “not only to preventing an
accident from happening in the first place, but if it does happen, you’re in a
much better spot.”


ROLLING OUT

Given these caveats, there’s a sensible approach to implementing telematics, and
it includes laying the groundwork for reduced driver and owner liability before
installing dashcams.

“If I’m an employer, I probably don’t want to jump right to camera systems when
I haven’t done the proper screening [and] don’t really know who’s behind the
wheel,” Stefan said.

“One of the first things an employer can do is improve their screening of
drivers through motor vehicle records. If you move towards the use of telematics
and camera systems, you need to have the personnel and systems in place to
manage the process, or it may backfire on you. An immense amount of data is
captured, and if you don’t properly manage it, you may have data that shows a
pattern of negligence in reacting to negative data. So start with the basics.
What’s the low-hanging fruit? There’s a logical sequence that an employer needs
to consider, because if you jump straight into the deep end, it’s probably going
to fail unless you’ve got the personnel in place to manage it.”

Jungeberg concurs: “Certainly, there are firms out there that are doing a really
good job of it — professionalizing the driver role, holding onto long-term
drivers and continuing to put a premium on safety and being claims-free, paying
their drivers well and training them and all of those good things. And those are
the ones that are succeeding with telematics right now.”

Donnacha Smyth, chief underwriting officer for casualty, AXA XL

For insureds, Smyth said, “showing themselves to be engaged in the training and
the technology is important: tracking their incidents, proving that they are
actively managing their frequency down and that their training is addressing
those behavioral issues. It’s a constant focus on training, but it’s also a
constant focus on doing what you say you’re going to do, not just making a
statement that ‘Our first priority is safety.’ You’ve got to prove that your
first priority is safety.”

And for their part, Smyth added, underwriters should be “partnering with clients
and offering some fleet safety training — sharing some of the burden of that
cost with our customers and clients, because we have an alignment of interests
there. If we can help them improve their drivers and their ultimate underwriting
result, that’s going to be good for us too.”

But what about the question still weighing on every fleet owner’s (and their
broker’s) mind: When will I see my premiums come down? The answer here, as with
the investment in safety itself, is that you can expect to see it pay off over
the long term.

“There are immediate gratification solutions in the marketplace from different
insurance companies that are trying to use this technology,” Paul said. “But the
vast majority of the marketplace is still not doing that. So in order to create
an opportunity to lower premiums under a regular guaranteed-cost insurance
product, the reduction of losses will be year by year.” &

David Agnew is an editor based in Philadelphia®. He can be reached at
riskletters@theinstitutes.org.





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SPONSORED: AXA XL



MAKING THE CONNECTION: ARE YOU PREPARED FOR RISING PROPERTY AND EQUIPMENT
BREAKDOWN COSTS?

Property’s biggest risk factors can directly impact the price of equipment
repairs. Risk management and loss prevention start when insureds make the
connection with valuations and work with the right partner to mitigate their
potential impact.
By: AXA XL | October 1, 2024

The commercial property insurance market has had its ups and downs in recent
years. The good news is that property rates seem to have stabilized in the
second quarter of 2024, though businesses are still seeing single-digit
increases. It’s a reminder for businesses to keep an eye on their property
exposures, especially when it comes to the large equipment they use to keep
their operations running.

Equipment breakdown can lead to property damage, business interruption, and
additional expenses for repair or replacement. This can increase the overall
cost of property risks, as organizations need to account for the potential
consequences of equipment breakdown when assessing their property risk
management strategies.

Today’s business equipment is more high-tech and specialized than ever before,
making unforeseen breakdowns, malfunctions or damages a substantial risk, should
they occur. Even the most well-maintained piece of equipment can experience
mishaps and cause significant financial loss.

“The changing nature of property risks, especially with high-tech equipment in
distribution centers and electronic sorting equipment, is a significant factor
contributing to an increase in insured property losses,” said Michele Sansone,
CUO property, Americas, AXA XL.

“The equipment breakdown aspect is critical. If specialized machinery is the
only source and there is no backup, it creates significant exposures for the
business,” added Cheryl Geidel, vice president, equipment breakdown, AXA XL.

The value of complex equipment continues to climb alongside the cost of fixing
it, as more expensive replacement parts and specialized diagnostic technicians
contribute to an uptick in pricing. Coupled with the recent strain on property
insurance, this is one risk businesses can’t afford to overlook.

For those operating large machinery and other equipment that requires regular
maintenance, it is imperative to get ahead of potential breakdown and
disruption, and to make sure they have the right risk mitigation tools in place.


TWO KEY FACTORS IMPACTING PROPERTY RATES

Michele Sansone, CUO Property, Americas, AXA XL

The first piece of the equipment protection puzzle is the need to understand
exactly what is affecting property rates and, consequently, pricing.

Verisk’s 2024 Global Modeled Catastrophe Losses reported that the average annual
loss from global natural catastrophes has reached a new high of $151 billion. In
the past five years, the actual annual insured losses from natural catastrophes
averaged $106 billion, compared with less than $83 billion in the preceding
five-year period.

“The pricing in the catastrophe insurance market is highly dependent on the
specific peril being insured. With the increased frequency and severity of
catastrophic events, insurers are seeing a significant uptick in activity in
this segment,” said Sansone.

“As a result, pricing is being adjusted to account for the heightened risk
exposure. The specific rates will vary based on the particular catastrophe being
covered, such as hurricanes, wildfires or floods.”

That can place rates at the mercy of Mother Nature — a challenge that’s led some
insureds to take on their own risk.

“To control pricing, customers are increasingly retaining more risk through
captives or larger deductibles, removing exposure from the market,” Sansone
explained.

Supply chain disruption is another big factor: “Supply chain issues and long
lead times for components and equipment have created challenges, often extending
business interruption periods to 15 to 18 months while waiting for critical
parts to arrive,” Geidel said.

Supply chain delays aren’t the only things causing strife; the rising cost of
materials and labor do as well. These factors continue to impact property
insurance, driving up the frequency and cost of claims and drawing attention to
contingent business interruption risks.

“Insureds often don’t fully understand the origin of their equipment, products
or stock. We view this lack of information as a significant risk — one that must
be addressed,” Sansone said.


ACCURATE VALUATIONS ARE EVERYTHING

Cheryl Geidel, Vice President, Equipment Breakdown, AXA XL

Another element businesses have to understand is that accurate valuation of
property goes a long way in managing the cost of equipment breakdown. Even with
rates showing a slow decline, it’s essential to have accurate values for
property, including equipment value.

“Regardless of whether the rate is two cents or ten cents, the starting point —
the values — must be accurate. There seems to be a misplaced sense of relief in
the industry that as pricing declines, the valuation issue will resolve itself.
However, the fundamental importance of getting the values right remains
unchanged,” Sansone explained.

If a business and its equipment are underinsured due to an incorrect valuation,
the insurance payout may not cover the full cost of repair or replacement.

Further, because of today’s higher rebuilding, repair and replacement costs,
businesses must be particularly wary about their policy limits. A loss could end
up costing significantly more than anticipated, causing insureds to quickly
erode any sublimits in place.

“It’s a challenging discussion, especially as the market softens and the focus
on values diminishes,” said Sansone.

However, this is one area where all insureds can get ahead. Partnering with
insurance professionals will ensure the right questions are being asked and
accurate values are being reported. Risk managers, brokers, the account
executive and producer all have a role to play in helping the insured to
understand their exposures.

Valuating individual equipment can be tricky, noted Geidel, especially as more
technology is incorporated into the machinery being used.

Breakdowns or failures often involve individual pieces of equipment rather than
an entire building. Insurance partners that ask questions, review and compare
values year-over-year on equipment types and rely on risk engineering reports to
better understand the equipment being used are a boon to the underwriting
process.

“Values are the basis of everything an underwriter does, so focusing on values
should be the starting point of the process,” Geidel said.


AN EMPHASIS ON PROTECTING PROPERTY AND EQUIPMENT

Technology is enabling property owners to place a larger emphasis on protection.
The unpredictability of hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires and other Nat CATs
can’t be controlled, but technology offers some control over their impact.

Advanced weather modeling, wildfire modeling, drone inspections and other
innovations help to predict and assess damages more quickly and accurately than
ever before.

Sansone also said that data-sharing can build resiliency into the market,
putting clients in an even better position should an incident arise.

“There’s an unfortunate perception that data is proprietary and sharing it could
undermine one’s competitive advantage. However,” she said, “this reluctance to
share data can hinder the industry as a whole.”

Collaboration and data-sharing among carriers could open the door for better
risk assessment and improved underwriting practices, in addition to resiliency.

“Transparency is a game changer in risk management. Sharing data can greatly
improve how organizations handle and reduce risks,” said Sansone.


PROPERTY RISK ENGINEERING AT ITS FINEST

Effective risk management makes clients better, which ultimately improves their
overall risk profile. At AXA XL, the team takes this philosophy and brings it
into everything it does. It’s not about a transaction; it’s about maintaining
relationships with customers in order to best protect them.

“When we commit to a piece of business, we aim to maintain that relationship.
Our focus is on risk improvement rather than just transactions so that we may
build lasting partnerships with our clients,” Sansone said.

AXA XL has done this by building a team of more than 400 risk engineers who work
closely with underwriting in order to provide the most accurate and detailed
insights about each client’s needs.

“Our underwriters rely on the data and insights that our property risk engineers
collect on site to price the risk we assume. But we also share the data they
collect with our clients to help them in their loss control efforts as well as
our own,” Geidel said.

“Our approach to underwriting and risk evaluation streamlines the claims process
in several ways. By engaging in bespoke underwriting and thoroughly assessing
each risk, we gain a deep understanding of the potential claims scenarios from
the outset,” Sansone added.

This comprehensive risk evaluation allows AXA XL to anticipate and prepare for
potential claims more effectively. As a result, when a claim does occur, the
team is well-equipped to handle it efficiently, because its process has
established a clear understanding of the underlying risk factors and policy
details.

 To learn more, visit:
https://axaxl.com/insurance/products/machinery-breakdown-insurance.




This article was produced by the R&I Brand Studio, a unit of the advertising
department of Risk & Insurance, in collaboration with AXA XL. The editorial
staff of Risk & Insurance had no role in its preparation.

AXA XL, the property & casualty and specialty risk division of AXA, provides
insurance and risk management products and services for mid-sized companies
through to large multinationals, and reinsurance solutions to insurance
companies globally. We partner with those who move the world forward. To learn
more, visit www.axaxl.com.







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