Tell us about the gen­e­sis of Fleet Insur­ance; how did you define your niche in this mar­ket­place?

Fleet Insur­ance was start­ed in 2011 to sup­port fleet own­ers who were seek­ing to achieve bet­ter com­mer­cial fleet insur­ance deals across the globe.

The rea­son to start this com­pa­ny was the real­iza­tion that fleet own­ers pay way too much for their com­mer­cial fleet insur­ance. I saw this when I was man­ag­ing direc­tor at an insur­ance com­pa­ny that spe­cial­ized in insur­ing com­mer­cial fleets. Often see­ing this, I thought I should start an insur­ance con­sul­tan­cy to work with the fleet own­ers to get them a bet­ter deal on insur­ance.

If you look at the glob­al mar­ket­place today, there are a lot of par­ties who do under­stand insur­ance and how that applies to fleets. How­ev­er, what makes us unique is that we are inde­pen­dent and we approach every­thing not from a pre­mi­um basis, but from an inte­grat­ed bench­mark basis. And in that domain we feel that we are unique.

Our role in the glob­al com­mer­cial fleet insur­ance domain is basi­cal­ly to apply a method­ol­o­gy that allows us to source the best pos­si­ble deal from all over the globe. What is unique is our approach. We look not only at the pre­mi­um bench­mark but at the total pic­ture, and on the basis of that process we are able to guide the fleet own­er in select­ing the right solu­tion for the right ter­ri­to­ry at the right price.

What are some of the ways Glob­al Insur­ance adds val­ue to the fleet client?

Now, the first thing we need to do when we are intro­duced to a client is to make an assess­ment of the client’s objec­tives. That is always the start­ing point and we have to under­stand whether or not we can add val­ue to the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. What we are not very good at is work­ing with clients who are pure­ly pro­cure­ment focused. There are nego­ti­a­tion skills that they can apply to get a bet­ter deal, but we feel that it can only be, at best, a short term. What we focus on is adding val­ue for the long term. That means bal­anc­ing the dri­ver pol­i­cy and the insur­ance pol­i­cy. That is where we add our val­ue.

At the moment, we focus exclu­sive­ly on work­ing with the fleet own­ers to achieve opti­mal insur­ance arrange­ments. We do that our­selves with our own con­sul­tants. In the process of achiev­ing the total ben­e­fits it is the fleet own­ers who engage with oth­er par­ties. It is our role to be sole­ly advis­ing the fleet own­er. We have no com­mer­cial rela­tion­ship with oth­er ancil­lary providers. Our remu­ner­a­tion is paid by the fleet own­er. We give them inde­pen­dent advice and to main­tain that inde­pen­den­cy we don’t have com­mer­cial or oth­er rela­tion­ships with oth­er ancil­lary providers.

What are some of the trends and issues you are see­ing in the glob­al fleet insur­ance mar­ket?

We are see­ing an increase in risk man­age­ment and an increase in cost of pre­mi­um, basi­cal­ly dri­ven by new reg­u­la­tions like the EU’s Solvency2 that require insur­ance com­pa­nies to keep more cap­i­tal and improve risk man­age­ment pro­ce­dures. As a result, there is a big risk for the fleet own­ers across the globe to be con­front­ed with blan­ket pre­mi­um increas­es across the board. There­fore, it is real­ly impor­tant to, at this point in time, iden­ti­fy the fleet-spe­cif­ic risk pro­file and per­form a com­pre­hen­sive bench­mark to achieve the pre­mi­um that fits the spe­cif­ic sit­u­a­tion of the fleet own­er.

The main issue that fleet own­ers face is that the knowl­edge of com­mer­cial fleet insur­ance with­in their own com­pa­nies is quite lim­it­ed. They out­source this knowl­edge and pur­chase it from bro­kers and insur­ers. What these bro­kers and insur­ers pro­vide is a very good cof­fer for the lia­bil­i­ties that a fleet own­er faces. How­ev­er, what they don’t pro­vide is bench­mark data, not only in pre­mi­ums but also claims that are incurred. Fur­ther­more, there is no stan­dard prac­tice of ana­lyz­ing in detail the risk pro­file of the com­pa­ny. As a result, the pre­mi­um that the fleet own­ers are being charged reflects the gen­er­al mar­ket rather than their spe­cif­ic needs and expo­sures.

Do you advise your clients on strate­gies they can use to reduce their fleet pre­mi­ums?

In order to reduce fleet pre­mi­ums there are basi­cal­ly two big pil­lars that need to be bal­anced. First of all, the fleet dri­ver pol­i­cy needs to be very clear. Some com­pa­nies some­times opt to have a “hap­py dri­ver pol­i­cy” and that doesn’t go very well with low­er pre­mi­ums. The sec­ond part is the insur­ance risk pol­i­cy that deter­mines the type of risk posi­tion the com­pa­ny wants to take. Are they will­ing to take on board the risk them­selves on their own books, or do they want to trans­fer the risk to an insur­ance com­pa­ny? In the process of going through that strate­gic deci­sion, we pro­vide advice and guid­ance.

Do you guide them on putting togeth­er their dri­ver pol­i­cy?

Dri­ver pol­i­cy — that is not some­thing that we spe­cial­ize in; we take that as a giv­en. What we do is we add the miss­ing link between the dri­ver pol­i­cy and the insur­ance pol­i­cy. We bring them togeth­er because we real­ly believe they have to work hand in hand in order to achieve the opti­mal insur­ance arrange­ments.

What is the fleet size that you work with?

When I start­ed out I felt that prob­a­bly the small­er fleet own­ers would ben­e­fit most from these type of con­sult­ing ser­vices, but in the end — after two and a half years now — the client base varies from 500 vehi­cles to 250,000 vehi­cles and the needs of the fleet own­ers vary across the whole globe.

Is there any­where that you don’t work?

At the present, we have not had expe­ri­ence in Africa and South Amer­i­ca. These are ter­ri­to­ries that are still in devel­op­ment. The con­sult­ing ser­vice we pro­vide depends on com­pe­ti­tion among poten­tial sup­pli­ers. The biggest fleets are con­cen­trat­ed in Amer­i­ca and in Europe and that is where we focus. That is where we have the data, the bench­marks and our exper­tise to sup­port fleet own­ers to achieve this max­i­mum deal.

e.vdwiel@fleetinsurance.nl