Ansvar hosts 60th celebrations and broker education forum

Benefact is owned by the Benefact Trust, a UK registered charity. According to Ansvar’s website, Benefact “exists to give all of its available profits to good causes” and is currently the UK’s fourth largest corporate donor giving tens of millions of dollars per year.

“We want to make sure that our Australian brokers and customers know that we’re part of a bigger group that grows its business to give back,” said Ansvar CEO Warren Hutcheon (pictured above).

“We’re different to most other insurers because of the heritage of the company that owns us and the goals and the objectives of that company,” he added.

Read more: Ansvar celebrates parent company’s donation milestone

The education forum at the event will examine enterprise risk management (ERM) and aim to provide the latest risk and governance insights.

“For brokers and clients, we’re really going to focus on enterprise risk management which is a little unique to us and as a specialist insurer we have a strong interest in providing risk management support for clients,” he said. “That means working with our customers, their organizations and boards around their risk governance and risk management frameworks,” he added.

Hutcheon said a panel of experts will focus on safeguarding.

“Safeguarding is about assisting organizations with the right practices and procedures to help protect vulnerable people, predominantly children, and also the disabled and older people that need care,” he said.

One of the panellists is Hetty Johnston, founder of Bravehearts Foundation and a leading child protection advocate. For the last three decades Bravehearts has provided industry-leading child protection training, education programs, specialist child sexual abuse counselling and support services. For the last 12 months Johnston has worked with Ansvar Risk to develop their risk management solutions for clients to prevent sexual abuse.

Supervising investigator Ben Boulton is another panellist. Boulton has more than a decade of experience with the Victoria Police Sexual Offences and Child-abuse Investigations Team (SOCIT) and three decades as a police officer.

Apart from the education forum, event delegates will likely be acutely aware of this year’s run of flooding disasters and their ongoing impacts across the industry. Hutcheon said this frequency of what are known as one in 100-year events is becoming a very common industry conversation.

“So the question is obviously being asked: are these really 100-year events? Or has a pattern formed that’s changing the frequency of these events?” he said.

Hutcheon said it is statistically possible to have multiple one in 100-year events within a few years, but then there should be a number of years before the next disaster.

“So in Australia and around the world we are having a lot of large material events continuously and we’ve had that over the last several years,” he said.

Hutcheon said the question then becomes, is this a new norm and what’s driving it?

“If climate change is really driving this much harder than was originally anticipated that leads into a whole raft of discussions around what does that then look like when you project out over the next three, to five, to 10 years?” he said.

This has major implications, said Hutcheon, for the insurance industry’s models for catastrophe exposure and catastrophe pricing.

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“So the industry has to consider how accurate are those models? Are the models now being revised? Or when will they be revised and what allowances will be made for the seemingly unpredictable changing conditions?” he said.

“Then it comes down to the question of insurability and affordability for the customer. So are certain locations going to be insurable and if they are insurable are they going to be affordable to the insured?” he said.

Hutcheon referenced the many years of work in this area by the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA).

In the lead up to the recent federal election the ICA released its “Building a More Resilient Australia,” policy platform. The plan called for all Australian governments to double federal funding towards disaster resilience to $200 million yearly until reaching $2 billion over the next five years.

The proposed measures included more than $500 million for flood levees in regional towns and more than $400 million to better protect homes against floods by raising utilities and services above the expected flood line.

According to Ansvar’s September event invitation, “a sumptuous breakfast” will help celebrate the parent company’s 60th anniversary. The UK based group CEO, Mark Hews, is also expected to announce plans to donate up to $440 million to good causes by 2025.