market talk
Andrew Newman
ow many bistros and wine bars can you think of that used to be former insurance branch offices? As one who spent nearly a decade in early career working in the insurer head office
environment, followed by a similar time span ‘on the receiving end’ in a regional branch, it’s been remarkable to note the resurgence of regional branch autonomy after some time in the doldrums. And particularly
interesting to see how the traditional branch operating model has been adapted. Face-to-face broker contact can be retained, but now with combined business development and
underwriting empowerment. Plus the avoidance of some of the pitfalls of the past. For instance, when local autonomy was strictly rationed, branch customer relationships could sometimes be knocked off course by an officious head office surveyor. Not a member of the local team and - in a former era - never trained in customer skills.
That’s why I find the business responsibilities of NIG’s Martin Hall so heartening - director of commercial underwriting, responsible for underwriting, pricing and surveying. Everything under one roof. “The regional underwriting teams all sit under one part of our structure,” he explains. “We don’t have a reporting structure that has HO underwriting teams in one sector, or pricing analysts in another. My job is to make all those parts of the business work together. “NIG now has 480 underwriters, pricing analysts and surveyors all working with common objectives across our branch network. That headcount will increase as the business continues to grow.”
In 2009 NIG reduced its branch network from 16 to 8 offices. “That enabled us to develop much stronger underwriting teams, working in more robust operations,” explains Martin. “What happened before was that with a larger number of smaller offices it was difficult
NIG champion face- to-face contact
www! A winner!
NIG enhance regional contact H
in
association with
to maintain the right level of expertise and consistency. It also meant a higher level of referrals going into HO. We solved that by placing an area underwriting manager into each new office, followed by specific specialists in property, motor, and liability. There are now 70% less referrals going into HO than three years ago, and 97% of our property risks can be underwritten in local offices with local decision making. “The key to that
achievement is a really strong governance structure, excellent data and with everyone pulling in the right direction with common objectives so that there’s no misalignment between HO and the regions. And that’s what we’ve done over the past couple of years. “More recently, over the last 18 months we’ve taken steps to make broker contact with our underwriters even easier. We aim to free up more time for underwriters to go out and visit brokers. This is encouraged and has been really well received by our brokers.
Wellard Warwick Winner! U
4 insurancepeople NOVEMBER 2011
Martin Hall
berrima fides, uberrimae fidei, utmost good faith, My word is my bond... the honesty doctrine may have received a few knocks in recent mis-selling debacles, but it’s still a winner! In the 3.20 at Warwick as a matter of fact. Wordismybond is the name of the horse that beat the favourite to the winning post at 4-1 on 4 October. The horse was named by its owners, Lloyd’s broker Terry Wellard and colleagues for fairly obvious reasons.
“We’ve invested in trading skills. We always had a good strong technical ability, but perhaps a not so strong emphasis on trading skills. With the assistance of training specialists we developed out own internal programme called ‘closing the deal’ to hone our trading and negotiation skills. “Broker-wise it’s fair to say NIG was previously known as leaning towards the ‘all things to all men’ stance, with agencies readily available. In the modern era we are now much stricter in our segmentation, and in the type of brokers we want to deal with. The days of simply producing quotes, for every intermediary who asks, are long gone. The job of our regional teams is to produce quotes and write business. That’s a different slant to where the business was a few years ago. And to do that, we now have a clear strategy with the right skill sets, confidence, and culture to move forward.”
Martin Hall joined NIG in 2009 and has 20 years’ underwriting experience with Zurich and Independent.
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