Ben Frith has joined Bellrock’s Real Estate consulting team as Insurance Manager. We spoke to him to find out how a consultative-led approach to insurance management goes beyond basic premium reviews.
With a background in insurance and property, Ben is well placed to provide insurance consultancy for retailers and commercial businesses. A six-year stint as a Senior Fiduciary Technician at global broker Marsh saw him overseeing insurer and client reconciliation challenges. He then went on to gain Chartered Insurance Institute qualifications, which led him to broker policies for commercial property owners, helping them get the right level of insurance at the right price. And it’s this experience that Ben is feeding into the insurance consultancy division at Bellrock Real Estate.
We sat down with Ben to hear how our insurance management approach is helping our clients navigate complex lease and insurance charges successfully.
For context…
“Occupiers of commercial retail units don’t often arrange buildings insurance themselves, landlords are generally obligated to arrange insurance to a certain level. The costs are then passed on to the occupier, which are stipulated in the lease. And this is where it can get tricky – analysing the costs and charges detailed can be difficult to decipher to the untrained eye. But this is where our insurance management expertise can help.
“Ultimately, our goal is to safeguard our clients’ expenses. As insurance consultants we do that by making sure that the insurance demands that are put to them by their landlords are correct. Simply put, this means because of our knowledge, we’ve got the fundamental understanding to do a deep dive, a forensic analysis if you like, of insurance cover in a way that our clients aren’t always able to do.”
We scrutinise costs so you don’t have to.
Ben and the team take a holistic approach to insurance management. The final cost isn’t taken on face value – all associated costs that build up to the final insurance demand are scrutinised.
“There are a lot of elements that make up a charge,” says Ben. “An insurance premium is ultimately made up of lots of component costs that make up the end figure. We can really analyse and deduce what those costs are and look at every aspect of the cover to establish what our clients are paying for.
“We can spot errors effectively. For example, we might query apportionment. If a client’s single or multiple estate is on a shared site and the landlord’s insurance has been arranged for a whole estate, then we can clarify the costs incurred and look to make sure the charges to our client have been calculated fairly and proportionately.”
We can use our skills to verify and validate.
Bringing insurance management experts on board gives clients the peace of mind that there’s someone overseeing the charges. Our insurance consultants can question, verify and validate charges on behalf of our clients.
“Often, when we’re appointed to an account, we find that there’s been an assumption in the past that there’s no problem with the insurance charges. That’s okay when the costs are controllable, but as soon as you suddenly get something which comes out left field – eye-watering rate increases or backdated amendments, for example – clients are often left trying to determine what has happened.
“This is where we can step in and diligently check the charges for them; to help them understand why. Having been an insurance broker, I can also use this experience to my advantage – it enables me to question the client’s broker, to really drill down into why charges have been applied in a certain way or to a certain value.
”For us, the work we do genuinely comes down to protecting clients’ interests and giving them the reassurance that the charges are being managed with an expert layer of governance; that if something doesn’t look right then we can investigate it. We’re helping them secure value for money at the end of the day and that’s a good thing."
