Tokio Marine HCC: Chris Ardern

Introduction:

Tokio Marine HCC is a leading global specialty insurance group with offices in the Americas, the United Kingdom, and continental Europe, transacting business in approximately 180 countries and underwriting more than 100 classes of specialty insurance.

Chris Ardern is a Risk Underwriting Manager at Tokio Marine, specialising in trade credit insurance. Chris has over 20 years of industry experience and works within a team that is responsible for the management of Tokio Marine's UK and Export risk, across an extensive portfolio of over 1,000 policyholders.

Challenge:

The primary role of a Risk Underwriter is to provide credit decisions and advice to policyholders, steering them away from poorly performing, deteriorating companies, and towards financially sound companies.

Chris and the team write cover on over 50,000 companies in the UK, so manually tracking all of those at once is impossible. A system that assesses risks as quickly and effectively as possible is vital to the team's successful operation. With credit limits ranging between £50k - £10m, Chris and the team need to leverage a wide range of decision-making tools to allow them to accurately assess risks, automate slow manual processes, and maintain an acceptable loss ratio within their division.

Solution:

Company Watch allows Chris and the team to take a systematic approach to manage insurance risk.

Used across the whole team, the Company Watch suite of tools provides a consistent benchmark to work from. Chris and the team draw information from various sources when assessing risk, Company Watch plays an essential role in their overall decision-making.

A key feature the team takes advantage of is Company Watch's powerful database segmentation. Through Company Watch's Monitoring functionality, Chris is able to upload the entire portfolio of each policyholder into the Company Watch system. 

By segmenting their database, Chris ensures that the team receives automated alerts on any key changes in a company’s financial health, director appointments, and new accounts filed. These alerts come directly into the email inbox, allowing the team to focus their attention on any key, poorly performing, risks in a portfolio and carry out essential further analysis.

Another key feature the team utilises is Aphrodite - enhanced director-matching. When performing due diligence, understanding the business history of the key individuals associated with a company is important for managing both financial risk and compliance risk, whilst also identifying potential “phoenix” directors. The team is able to view a confidence percentage match that an individual is who they say are and doesn't have a hidden history of failed companies behind them.

The quality and accuracy of data and information Chris and the team work with are of paramount importance to the success of their operations. The information contained within the Company Watch online platform is clearly presented and simple to use, allowing the team to assess risk easily and efficiently. Having all the key information they need in one accessible place saves the team time during their risk assessment process and allows them to relay better credit decisions to their policyholders.

Company Watch continuously assists Tokio Marine’s overall underwriting performance and allows the team to maintain an acceptable loss ratio.

"We are always looking for long-term relationships with our policyholders, but also with our information providers too. Company Watch has been a very positive relationship for us over the years, they are straightforward and easy to work with".

"I don’t believe there is anything else quite like Company Watch on the market".