Marsh Risk Consulting
on site, what consumables are on site, what are the fire loadings etc. “Then you would write up all of your findings in a substantial report, around 100 pages, and underwriters will use that report to evaluate and price the risk. “Within the report, you need to asses critical elements. For example, if you were reviewing a printing factory, the fire loading colloquially would be enormous because of the paper, the glue and packaging materials. You would look out for high levels of protection and prevention – things like fire sensors and air extraction etc. Practically speaking, we know where the key risk areas are. “A big part of the risk understanding is not only the fire, burn, break; it’s the understanding of business interruption and the consequences of the particular kind of loss,” explains von Widdern. The first port-of-call is to understand the risk as deeply as is possible and being able to recommend risk prevention and reduction strategies and this is where the report developed by MRC becomes important. “The critical outputs of the survey report are what we call the estimated maximum loss (EML) and the maximum possible loss (MPL) scenarios,” says von Widdern. “EML is a large loss scenario but where protective systems work - so the fire prevention works, or you can minimise the impact of plant failure etc. The MPL is where your
prevention systems don’t work - maybe a plane hits your roof and wipes out your sprinkler system for example. “The first order of business is to understand the risk and understand the likely insurability and size of a possible claim on the risk, write the report, and hand it in. The report then goes to our insurance market brokers. “After that we raise many recommendations for the clients on how we can assist them to improve the risk – things always need attention and this leads to the next level of consulting which is risk management or risk programme delivery. Here, we go right from the bottom and help develop standards, help with training, help with implementation, we have a very strong audit programme, we do benchmarking and validations and all the like and we effectively become the rent-a-risk manager providing the right resource as required across the whole qualitative operational risk area.”
COMMITTED Marsh has by far the largest risk consultancy team in the country and von Widdern says that this shows the company’s expertise and commitment to the industry. “Our team has around 110 people working on this and the next biggest team for any other broker has fewer than ten and this demonstrates the commitment we have to this side of the work,” he says.
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