Aviva commits to provide risk management support to brokers in wake of pandemic

Insurer Aviva has committed to providing brokers with additional risk management support and educational resources as the Covid-19 pandemic develops into “a challenging economic environment” and “a hard market”.

Speaking exclusively to Insurance Times following the publication of Aviva’s H1 financial results yesterday, Phil Bayles, the company’s chief sales and marketing officer, explained that Aviva is running a series of webinars for brokers as part of its Back to Business campaign. To date, the overall webinar programme has attracted around 6,000 attendees.

One of the more popular webinar series has been around the hard market, discussing how to mitigate its effects, garner early engagement with clients and manage messaging. Bayles said that 2,500 participants attended this webinar series alone.

“A lot of brokers won’t have faced into a hard market before, so we’re running webinars, for example, in helping brokers and their teams manage those messages into their clients and making sure that they engage with their clients early and help to mitigate the impacts of the hard market as much as possible,” he continued.

Mitigating ‘pain points’

Bayles added that Aviva has worked very closely with its broker partners during the pandemic in order to mitigate “pain points” they may have been experiencing.

He said: “There were various pain points and have been various pain points that have emerged with customers, whether it’s laying up fleet or an occupied property, so we worked very closely with the brokers to make sure that our cover was appropriate and we tailored. We moved our unoccupied property warranty from 30 days to 90 days. Things like that which [reflected] the main pain points that brokers were having with their customers.”

Building on this approach, Aviva then sought to support brokers further with risk management services.

“We’re faced with a challenging economic environment,” Bayles continued. “We know that brokers and their clients, many are still struggling from the aftermath of Covid. If you’ve got hospitality sector clients, they’re either still shut or open on a fairly limited basis, so what we’re focusing on now is giving them lots of risk management support.

“It’s about providing timely information and resources that Aviva, as a big organisation, can provide those to our brokers and they in turn can provide that back to their clients. We’ve had really good feedback and it’s our intention to carry on providing that level of support.”

Speaking to journalists yesterday morning, Aviva chief executive Amanda Blanc also confirmed the firm friendship between Aviva and its broker partners.

She added: “We do invest very heavily in the UK broker channel. We are incredibly well supported by the UK brokers. The UK broker channel to us is clearly very, very important, as the broker channels are right across Aviva. We will continue to invest in the UK broker channel and they’re an important part of our future.”