Multi-Location Business Insurance: Building One Group Programme

Why programmes fragment in the first place

Fragmentation is not a sign of neglect. It is the natural result of how companies grow. A plant is commissioned and the plant head buys fire and machinery cover from the broker who handles the town. A warehouse is leased and the logistics manager takes whatever the landlord’s agent suggests. A subsidiary is acquired and comes with its own policies, its own broker and its own renewal dates. A regional office buys its motor fleet cover through the dealer.

Each decision was reasonable on its own. Together they produce the familiar picture:

• Several brokers, none of whom sees the whole group.
• Renewal dates scattered across the year, so something is always about to expire.
• Different cover bases — one plant on reinstatement value, another on book value, a third on a figure nobody can trace.
• Different deductibles, different exclusions and different named perils for the same class of risk.
• Policy copies sitting in local files, spreadsheets and inboxes rather than in one place.

The cost shows up as premium (each unit buys as a small risk), gaps (nobody checks whether the new warehouse was ever added) and time (head office spends weeks every year chasing paperwork).

The case for one group programme

Consolidation means treating the group as a single insured with many locations, rather than many insureds who happen to share a parent. In practice it delivers four things.

One register. Every policy, every location, every asset and every vehicle recorded once, with the same fields, in a structure that head office and the units both use. The corporate insurance register is the foundation; everything else is built on it.

Common expiry. When all material policies renew on the same date, the group negotiates once, presents its whole risk once, and can run a proper renewal process with a timetable instead of reacting to whichever expiry comes next.

Group buying. A programme covering, say, eight plants and twenty warehouses is a better risk to underwrite than any one of them alone. Losses are spread, the sum insured attracts competition, and the group can negotiate rates and deductibles it would never get site by site.

Uniform cover basis. The same wording, valuation basis, deductibles and extensions at every location. When a loss happens at a site the finance team has never visited, they already know how the policy responds.

Stage one: find out what you actually have

Do not start by asking brokers for quotes. Start by asking every unit for every policy it holds, including the ones it thinks are unimportant. Things turn up: a marine policy nobody has declared against for two years, a liability cover bought for one event and renewed ever since, two fire policies on the same warehouse.

For each policy capture the basics: insurer, policy number, class, period, sum insured, premium, deductible, the locations and assets it covers, and who at the unit owns it. Ask for the policy document, not just the schedule; where a unit cannot produce it, note that too. Resist the urge to fix things as you go. See the whole picture first.

Stage two: build the common register and align expiries

Now normalise the inventory into a common register. Every location gets a single identifier and address. Every asset is tagged to a location and a business unit. Every policy is linked to the assets and locations it covers. This is where the gaps and overlaps become visible: a plant extension commissioned last year that no policy mentions, a vehicle that appears on two fleet schedules, a warehouse insured on a sum that has not moved in five years.

Run a gap analysis against the register before you go to market. It is far easier to fix a gap while you are re-placing the programme than to add it afterwards.

Then align the expiries. Pick a common date, and as each existing policy comes up, renew it short-period to that date rather than for a full year. Within twelve months everything lands on one date. Choose it with care — avoid financial year-end, festival seasons and the peak of any seasonal risk such as monsoon flooding.

Stage three: group placement

With a clean register and a common date, the group can go to market as a group. The usual shape is a small number of master policies — property, machinery breakdown, liability, fleet, marine, employee benefits — each with a schedule of locations attached. Where regulation requires separate policies per entity, the wording, basis and deductibles are still kept identical. A good placement looks like this:

• One underwriting submission describing the whole group, with a location schedule drawn straight from the register.
• A single broker mandate, or at most one per region where regulation requires a local intermediary.
• A standard wording agreed for each class, with unit-specific requirements handled as endorsements rather than separate policies.
• A deductible structure the group can absorb centrally, so smaller units are not carrying deductibles they cannot afford.
• A premium allocation method agreed before placement, so units know what they will be charged and why. See allocating premium across business units.
• A claims protocol that tells every site who to call and what to send on day one.

Governance: who owns what

A consolidated programme fails quietly if nobody is responsible for keeping it current. Write down the roles before it goes live, not after the first missed addition.

The centre owns the register, the wordings, the renewal calendar, broker relationships and the approval of anything that changes the programme’s shape. Units own the accuracy of their own data: new assets, disposals, headcount changes, new vehicles, changes of address. Finance owns the premium allocation and recharges. HR owns employee benefits enrolment. Each of those hands over to the centre at a defined point.

An approval matrix keeps it honest. A typical one distinguishes between routine endorsements a unit can request directly (a vehicle added to the fleet); changes that need the insurance manager’s sign-off (a new location, a sum insured change above a threshold); and changes that go to the CFO or a risk committee (a new class of cover, a change of insurer, a deductible increase). Keep it to one page.

A register on one person’s laptop cannot support unit-level ownership. A system such as SAIBA Corporate lets each unit maintain its own locations and assets while the centre keeps the policies, approvals and the group-wide view.

Pitfalls to plan for

Statutory covers that must stay local. Not everything can be centralised. Motor third-party liability, workmen’s compensation, certain licence-linked covers and some employee benefits are required by local law to be placed with a locally licensed insurer, in the local entity’s name, sometimes in the local language. Across a group spanning India, the Gulf and Africa this is the rule rather than the exception. Keep these policies local but bring them into the register and onto the common expiry wherever the law allows.

Currency. Locations in several countries mean sums insured in several currencies. Decide early whether the master policy is written in one currency with local policies beneath it, or whether each location is insured locally with the master sitting above as difference-in-conditions cover. Either way, record every sum insured in its original currency and revalue at a stated exchange rate at renewal, so a currency move does not silently create under-insurance.

Acquisitions. Every acquisition arrives with its own fragmented programme. Have a standard onboarding checklist: inventory, register, short-period renewal to the common date, then absorb into the master policies at the next renewal.

Under-insurance exposed by uniformity. Moving everyone to the same basis reveals sums insured that were wrong all along. That is the programme working.