Insurance and Risk Management Cost Optimisation Specialists
Every company has insurance, there just in case something goes wrong. Whether that’s under their control or out of it. It is necessary and can also be costly. As insurance is a tightly regulated market and companies often deal with brokers, it is a cost that can be hard to negotiate. This difficulty is made more difficult by the industry entering a ‘hard’ market: insurers tend to be more cautious when putting a price tag on certain risks.
This caution has led to higher premiums, and the market is drowning. However, Covid-19 has unexpectedly provided a lifeline; the pandemic has caused lower personnel activity in most sectors, leading to fewer claims and less-costly damage statistics.
Before 2020, approximately 6% of European workers aged 20-65 worked from home. Today, that figure has more than doubled. Fewer people in the office means fewer insurance claims, which means lower premiums.
Cross-Border Collaboration
Insurance is managed at both local and national levels in most pan-European companies. The services of national brokers are, therefore, utilised to source and advise on their insurance needs.
However, this can lead to two major issues:
- Even when local optimisation is achieved, it does not necessarily mean global optimisation.
- Different national legal rules may lead to some uninsured risk.
When faced with these challenges, many companies will try to have a central policy covering all subsidiaries for all risks. That can be extremely expensive. If this is the case, ERA can help.
Industry Challenges
Not all companies will face the same challenges. The scale and impact of these challenges can vary, but by taking the proactive approach of continuous improvement, you can lower costs and protect your business. Below are several common issues being faced by businesses within the insurance and risk management sector:
- Maintaining or lowering a good risk profile
- Carrying out effective risk management to reduce cyber insurance premiums
- Optimising fleet insurance
- Working with your broker
To learn more about these challenges and others that face the insurance and risk management sector, ERA has a global team of experts that are available to you. Get in touch with us to learn more about how we can assist you in solving your challenges.
“By using a specialised consultancy, rather than traditional intermediaries (such as brokers or agents), ERA provides you with the opportunity to evaluate your best approach to risk management. We want to optimise the overall costs of risk, including uninsured losses and finance costs.”
Our Services at a Glance
At ERA Group, our insurance and risk management specialists take a holistic approach to your business, conducting detailed audits and analysis to provide a range of effective solutions designed to help optimise your business and maximise your operating efficiencies.
By taking a pro-active approach, we can help you protect the future success of your organisation.
- Direct Cost Optimisation: Conducting a detailed analysis of your annual spend pattern and seasonality can be a daunting-but-necessary task to obtain the best prices and terms. In addition, you need to identify and select the right suppliers from the myriad available. Finally, you also need to have good insight into the available services in the market and the impact those services will have on your price.
- Go-To-Market Strategy: Doing a review can be an important part of your supply chain and financial risk management, helping to give you transparency of areas that are not performing well.
- Invoice Control: It can be time-consuming to check all invoices against agreed prices, especially with several surcharges, of which some are changing on a regular basis. This complexity also results in invoicing errors by the suppliers. It can be costly for you to not validate the invoice amounts before paying invoices.
- Managed Procurement:
Frequent and significant price fluctuations in the market can make it very time consuming for you to ensure you have competitive pricing, not to mention the challenge of achieving price transparency or knowing if the received prices are competitive. Asking two to five suppliers is not enough to gain assurance but our specialists can provide you with resources and confidence. - Price Calculator: Larger companies often have more than one supplier, especially within a particular lane, with added complexity when a promised share of shipments is included. This can lead to a lack of transparency making it difficult for you to decide which supplier to use and when.