The Challenge 

For Maersk, one of the largest logistics companies in the world, keeping track of their risk changes, declarations, premium adjustments and expected versus received invoices was a manual, time-consuming task. Their risk management team, captive representatives in local entities, brokers, and insurers were all suffering from antiquated traditional processes. 

“Shipping is a very old-fashioned industry [...] very transactional, a lot of paper pushing and a lot of contract administration. Dealing with those manually is a very cumbersome process, and very prone to human error,” Maersk’s VP and Head of Risk Management, Lars Henneberg, explained. 

Unsurprisingly, Lars preferred his team to spend those hours understanding the risks they have as a business better and devising the best strategies to transfer some of this risk, to ensure the smallest costs and be ready for any foreseeable losses. As a result of these administrative burdens, it was estimated that for every dollar spent on insurance, only 30 - 40% of it would be allocated to risk premiums, with the rest eaten up by transactional costs. 

Similarly, for Lars, the process of tracking marine war risk breaches was a manual process involving a written declaration by the captain of the vessel entering a listed area, confirming expected and actual arrival and departure times. This process could lead to dozens of emails between Maersk’s operations and insurance teams, and their broker and insurer. “We have 500 to 600 of those calls every year for our own fleet and 600 on our charter fleet. So more than 1000. So, you can imagine three a day [...] an extremely cumbersome process,” he added. 

Beyond streamlining their contract administration, Maersk was also in need of a solution centred around the need for an analytical service in order to model their data and understand their risk on a granular level. This was especially important for their captive as this new addition helped them reconsider how they spread risk and manage their capital effectively.  

The Solution

A connected insurance experience 

Partnering with Insurwave, a SaaS platform for the specialty insurance market, Maersk could effectively facilitate its insurance needs through a single, shared platform. Using the platform, Maersk could connect its live fleet data to its insurance policies, and connect with the insurance market to their end clients, creating a seamless automated experience for all parties. Automated documentation and tracking

What was once an admin-heavy process in tracking war risk, could now be automated, with Maersk now possessing the ability to track, in real-time, exactly where their vessels enter and exit zones, with email notifications and alerts automatically generated alongside additional premium calculations. By automating these processes, Maersk increased its operational efficiency and freed up Lars and his team to focus on the key risk events and make faster decisions to mitigate them. 

Taking an analytical approach  

For Maersk, having an analytics dashboard where they can see how their assets and policies have changed over time and quickly analyse premium flow over the course of the policy term provided the shipping and logistics company with granular insights to accelerate their decision-making process.  

The Outcome

More time for what matters 

As Insurwave’s first user, Maersk simplified the administrative part of its insurance management program, automating admin tasks, connecting participants and reducing reconciliation efforts, allowing Lars and his team to focus on the work that added real value. 

Lars shared that prior to adopting Insurwave, “we used to spend 75% of our time on non-value-adding contract administration, and only 25% of the time on strategic analysis and initiatives, trying to understand the risk as an organisation, when it should be the opposite". Insurwave turned this on its head. 

Now, instead of spending most of their time on non-value-adding tasks, by using Insurwave’s platform, these figures could be effectively reversed with manual tasks taking up less than a quarter of the team’s workload, allowing for more time spent on strategy and initiatives to understand their risk landscape more effectively. 

After achieving significant operational savings with their Hull & Machinery and War and programmes, Maersk has expanded its use of Insurwave to include property, activating over 800 assets that are covered under more than 55 insurance contracts.  

With their brokers and insurers connected to the platform, manual data sharing and reconciliation between the parties are things from the past. Premium adjustments are automated on the platform, allowing Maersk to correctly forecast premium spend across every asset, location and policy for the policy term. This is significant when property exposure changes occur at least 150 times a year, and war breaches surpass thousands annually.  

“We have basically automated a lot of our processes internally, and all the processes around the interaction with the market. That simply has made it possible for us to be risk managers again instead of insurance contract administrators”, Lars explained. 

A single source of truth 

Having a single and live view of risk was a key enabler in understanding the performance of their risk portfolio and considering alternate forms of outward reinsurance protection to secure their position in a competitive market.

Therefore, they were able to do so due to having a detailed and easy-to-digest view of their exposure data and premium change trends by cause. The intuitive analytics dashboard informed a more effective decision-making process for their captive to better allocate their resources. 

As a result of this work, thousands of Maersk assets are now actively tracked and monitored across multiple policies on the platform.