Q&A: Tara Parchment, head of private clients, Brit
Tara Parchment joined Brit to head up its private client offering in November 2018, after 22 years at Chubb. She spoke to Post about plans for the division, how it will meet the changing customer needs and how the current pandemic is affecting the high net worth and ultra-high net worth sector.
What are your ambitions for the private client offering?
For Brit, as an organisation, and certainly myself and my private client team, we’ve got great ambitions for this business. We all believe very strongly that a proposition that is based on relationships, personal service and flexibility can be of great value to customers and to brokers.
We’ve spent a lot of time and effort up front to create the product, but also the infrastructure behind that product to build a very long term profitable business.
Our plans are to build out our distribution base and really start to establish our reputation as a HNW insurer. There are some fantastic competitors out there and we would very much like to be seen in that camp. So this year is all about building those relationships, building our distribution base and earning a reputation as an outstanding HNW insurer.
The opportunity for growth, whether that’s through products or territories, are numerous. Over the next few years, we will be looking to expand in various ways. One of the exciting things is looking at how we can leverage our position as a Lloyd’s syndicate to bring creative solutions to clients in the HNW space that may not be entirely available today.
The product is very broad, focusing on HNW to ultra high net worth customers, but it does need to be fairly diverse and broad to really align with the customers that we’re looking to insure.
People’s lifestyles, their interests, and the things that concern them are changing all the time, so the product has got to be able to meet and address those needs and concerns.
What trends are you seeing in HNW and UHNW space?
Over recent years, the trends have certainly been around the nature of collections that people have. They are much more diverse and HNW insurance products need to understand that and respond to that.
Fine art collections – such as furniture and paintings - have very much evolved to being anything from handbag collection to comics, and now increasingly things like trainers are really becoming collectable items.
As an industry, we need to be able to respond to that and provide expertise around assessing values and understanding how these collections should be stored and looked after and being flexible around that.
It’s about understanding each individual client and what is important to them and then offering them a product that gives them protection around the things that are important to them.
So the trends are constantly changing. Cyber is increasingly becoming a common theme. There are different aspects to that, there’s cyber fraud, and we cover cyber fraud within our wording because that’s a very real threat - so we offer advice and services to tighten up a family’s internet security and their online presence.
There’s also been a much greater risk, for example, around the amount of information that criminals can find online – it doesn’t take an awful lot to research a target, understand where they live, when they’re there and when they’re not there, the kinds of jewellery they might be wearing. That’s a very real risk and something that we’re very focused on to be able to advise around the whole risk management to prevent these customers from becoming a target.
How is the current pandemic affecting the sector?
The travel industry has seen a massive impact - most HNW products will have travel insurance as an option. The other side is the impact of it on the exposures that we have
On one hand, you might have people whose home occupancy is much higher because we have all been on lockdown. So it might be fair to say that as an industry we would see fewer home losses and even escape of water losses, as you could argue these would be noticed sooner potentially. On the other hand, at this particular time, people have multiple homes, so while the occupancy of one home might be much higher, actually for a secondary home, it might be much less.
Launching in this environment, while on lockdown, has been interesting. I can say it’s gone remarkably well. The technology is working incredibly well. We have a suite of documents we can send out to brokers and customers. As an industry, everybody’s got to adapt.
How the sector adapted to cope with the pressures of the pandemic?
There seems to have been a remarkable shift in how the insurance industry views flexible working and working from home, and it has taken a remarkable amount of adaptation from employee’s point of view and individuals but also on an organisational level. I’ve been really impressed with that. The challenges have been around delivering really high levels of service and fostering fantastic relationships. HNW is all about relationships with brokers and with customers and it’s very personal – so people have to be inventive.
The way the business is done has definitely changed during the lockdown period and it has very much fast tracked something that was on everybody’s mind. I can only really speak for Brit, but in terms of technology we’ve been really improving that over the last year or so and by the time lockdown came around for us, everybody had the right equipment, and from day one we were up and running and ready to provide a pretty seamless service.
If you look at the return to work in Lloyds, for example, that’s not going to look anything like it did pre-lockdown. The way they’re using technology it’s been fast-tracked which is fantastic. It’s probably progressed over maybe five years – who knows.
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