AIG chooses London specialist for electronic yacht insurance facility
Wednesday August 30 2006. AIG, the world’s biggest insurer, has chosen Underwriting Risk Services, a key London specialist, to operate a unique Europe-wide electronic facility for yacht insurance.
As well as being a first in its sector, the totally automated facility is a pioneer in the wider insurance market, which has found it tough to apply technology successfully to the coverage of many risks.
The US based insurer selected the company, a subsidiary of Lloyd’s entity Talbot Holdings and known by the acronym URSL, after months of talks with several candidates bidding to help AIG branch into this segment of the European market.
To allow brokers to secure hull and liability policies for vessels up to a value of €500,000 ($638,000), a website known as Yacht-Mark.com has been launched following trials. It will provide online quotations and produce documents within minutes of binding a risk, removing the need for any manual intervention in the underwriting process.
Documentation in French, Italian and Spanish will be introduced before the end of 2006.
URSL acts as an agent for Lloyd’s and other underwriters and has established considerable headway in the higher value yacht sector through its website yachtsure.com, which has insured limits of $4m, and its Yachtsure brand, which can provide cover up to $58m.
In 2005 URSL underwrote more than £40m ($76m) of premium.
Nicholas Hales, managing director of URSL, said his company has been working on the project with AIG for a year. The only way to approach the business is to create a full ecommerce trading site aimed at European brokers.
URSL commissioned Transactor, a Winchester company whose main field of expertise is call-centre work, to build the technology, which is complex because of the interaction of insurance fields — for instance, when a claim goes above a certain limit, a surveyor is automatically contacted.
Mandatory liability certificates which a broker can print or email to yacht owners are provided for any European territorial waters.
Mr Hales said: “People’s appetite for electronic commerce has changed dramatically in the last two to three years, and brokers are looking at ways of enhancing their margins.
“The UK market is well served, but we are looking at the traditional agency market across Europe. We already have relationships with various European brokers in the field of higher value craft, and we know they have smaller value yachts they want to protect.
“Technology is certainly the key to our continued development. It gives us opportunities to bring additional business to our supporting underwriters speedily and efficiently.”
Mr Hales is working closely with Nick Weltmann, a senior underwriter with with worldwide responsibilities at AIG subsidiary AIU (New York), who wants to expand personal lines business including what the major insurer terms personal watercraft insurance. Nicholas Walsh, executive president of AIG foreign general insurance division, said URSL had demonstrated with Yacht-Mark.com its progressive thinking and commitment to underwriting excellence.