Broker profile: 'I don’t need brain teasers to keep my mind active'

Sunshine Coast award-winning Crucial Insurance & Risk Advisors Account Manager Alishia Oliver made a “giant leap” into the technical advisory/commercial realm of insurance, and loves tackling the challenging learning curve.

Were you surprised to win NIBA’s Young Professional Broker for the state?

I won the Queensland title last year. I am still a little bit shocked; it was a pretty amazing experience. My boss, (MD) Tony Venning also took out the National Broker award, so it was an exciting time for our office, that’s for sure, taking out both those awards.

How did you get your start in broking?

I found a receptionist role with one of the brokerages and I got to know all the brokers that I worked with there and to see what they did for their clients and kind of got the bug I suppose. Prior to that I did not even know what insurance broking was, or what they did and what an amazing industry it is.

Within 12 months I was offered a position as a domestic account executive. I just jumped at the opportunity and haven’t looked back since. I did the domestic program for four years, and then started moving into commercial.

I did find it a little bit hard to move across into commercial because I just have that love for domestic clients and teaching them, almost like they were my own little proteges, their home insurance and their motor and stuff.

I actually really got to train them, they almost became their own brokers in a way. When they say ‘I handled this, I think my insurance is perfect’, that’s good, that’s what we want. We want you to understand and know what you’re doing – and rely on advice when things get a little bit more complicated.

In my second role, I was offered a position to help head up their domestic scheme because they had an over 55s scheme. That slowly merged into commercial/domestic role, plus assisting in the higher commercial realm.

The commercial space is a whole different ballgame with a different level of satisfaction. You’re helping these businesses expand and get to move into their own different realms of business by helping them with their insurance to almost facilitate those moves and drives, whether it be overseas or starting to move into different products, and making sure that they’ve got those sorts of exposures covered off correctly and known rather than unknown.

I still do help with a lot of our domestic clients purely because I don’t want to let go of them. I think I never will let them go completely, I am always bugging the poor other brokers here in the office that do handle our domestic clients, saying ‘What’s happening with that one? What’s happening in this space?’ They say, ‘Can you just leave us be Alishia!’

What’s your current role?

In my new role here with Tony, I sort of did a giant leap into the technical/advisory commercial realm of insurance, which I have to say has blown my mind but is an amazing learning curve.

Some of the clients that we do deal with are ASX-listed companies. Some of them have a broad organisation structure and different things going on with different activities, various entities. Overseas exposures and things like that. So it gets a little bit technical with fiddling with all those bits and pieces.

There’s just so much more to it. I keep telling people don’t need brain teasers anymore to keep my brain active! The insurance does enough of that.

We approach our clients on a full risk-review basis and look at everything that they’ve got. We like to have a whole-of-account view of the client so we can see where they have covered off different risks, and give them advice on where we might see an exposure for them.

We give them a full overview with a report that will confirm their exposures or the policies they need to think about, extensions or gaps, or it could be additional activities missed off their description and why that matters.

And then we’ll basically handhold in just training them up in how to understand their own risk, to make sure that we’ve plugged any of those holes where needed.

How are you finding placing cover? Is capacity and pricing improving at all?

On most lines we’re seeing it start to switch around. On the financial lines we are starting to see a little bit more relief as the increases aren’t as substantial, whereas over the last couple of years that hasn’t been the case.

It’s kind of been like that I suppose since the 2010 floods, but really I think we’re starting to see some movement where it is starting to soften in different areas of the insurance market.

It might be still hard in a number of lines – cyber is definitely a hard market – but there are definitely areas that are starting to soften from my perspective. Property is starting to spot back up as well as cyber due to the obvious factors, but otherwise, it’s not too bad. We have encountered harder times.

It’s probably more the matter of getting responses through and in a timely fashion. The whole industry is dealing with not having enough hands on deck to get everything done, so constantly chasing those sorts of things is probably the area that we struggle with most at the moment.

But we haven’t really struggled with finding placements. They’re not as steep increases as we’ve seen on some lines for a fair while – especially professional indemnity and for some industries, builders and surveyors particularly. That did increase with what was happening in the market but I think we’re starting to see the better end of that.

It is just the larger ISR ones that we’re seeing some of those increases with little other market in some of the less appealing risks – timber properties or anything with high combustible items inside the property.

Office risks have also seen a bit more of an increase following the floods, whereas previously you could place those almost with your eyes closed. We’re seeing a lot more questions come back, particularly around restriction of access in the city areas from the floods. That was an unexpected twist that I probably should have seen coming.

What do you like to do when you’re not broking?

I really love catching up with my family, with my mom and my nana. I’ve got a little mastiff and a whippet, Ralph and Tiffany, and we’ll go out with the dogs and go for a picnic. Otherwise, I am a bit of a gamer so I do tend to spend some time on the console sometimes, and I do like to do a bit of craft. We are in the Moreton Bay region. Things are beautiful around here and green, the beach is absolutely lovely and it’s just a really good spot to go for a wander and see the surroundings.