Broker profile: 'I just got the client list and started ringing'

Brisbane-based Capital Innovation Insurance Group Director and Chair of NIBA’s Queensland divisional committee Steven Hill, pictured, says sports insurance got him hooked on broking in his teens.

What was your entry to the industry?

I started when I was 19. My first job was at a broking company that was a sports insurance specialist. I grew up playing sport and the two combined just clicked for me. I was hooked.

It makes the insurance policy easier to interpret when there’s that natural connection.

I learned the ropes for a few years and then I moved into the general insurance brokerage. I was fortunate that I had a manager who was always willing to answer my questions and taught me that in a profession like insurance broking, you need to be able to see into the client’s business.

That takes a few years to hone that sort of skill and the confidence as a younger person to have strong and powerful conversations with a client who is more often than not going to be older than you.

Eventually I ended up being the state manager – this was around 2000/2001 – there was a serious issue in the insurance market around liability insurance for sport and recreation. That was around the time HIH collapsed, which certainly amplified it.

Myself and a handful of other leaders in the business then bought the company. That took me to Melbourne, and then we sold the company to what was then OAMPS and now is Gallagher.

I worked there for a few years, I ended up meeting some people through my work at NIBA and being offered a role at Aon.

Tell us about Capital Innovation

We have people in three states and headquarters in Tasmania. We employ close to 40 people. We’re probably one of the largest private brokerages in Tasmania. We have lots of clients in the fishing world and the logging world, then clients in every other world as well.

I would say the way I do insurance broking is I provide the client with the best cover at the best price – and never the other way around.

Nobody should fear the conditions of the new Code of Practice, especially around the outlining of remuneration to clients. There is a bit of fear around at the moment from people that aren’t used to that but I spent some time at Aon, and that’s where I learned how to have that conversation with a client.

More often than not, they won’t challenge you. It boils down to the responsibility of the employers in the broking companies to train their people and have the adult conversation with the client. Because nobody works for nothing, everybody knows there’s money exchanged somewhere.

The financial year that just closed out was stronger than the two years before and clients seem to be more hopeful about the future. So a bit of normality returning and a bit of optimism. You notice that in their spending habits. The challenge now becomes what happens when interest rates go up? What happens when inflation goes up?

I think every retailer, if you can call an insurer a retailer, is feeling that – everyone’s trying to go for the same piece of the pie.

How did you manage after the February/March floods?

I’ve got clients in Queensland and NSW and in the Northern Territory. The amount of rain in that event was just absolutely out of control.

I had a busy few days and weeks, just like every broker in southeast Queensland in northern NSW. On the Monday morning after the rain had stopped I just got my client list and started ringing, even the ones that didn’t have any trouble. That’s just old school client service.

Within reason, I know my clients well enough to know where their locations are and how the weather impacted them but I still rang everyone just to make sure that they weren’t stuck somewhere or something like that.

There’s still hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of clients who have got claims unresolved, even though the weather event was at the end of February. Rightly or wrongly, insurers are relying on hydrology reports still in commercial claims and there’s a huge backlog for them.

So we have clients that have not had indemnity granted to them, nor declined, and it’s coming up to seven months.

It certainly doesn’t make it easier to provide service. It makes it a more challenging conversation with the client, because the one thing that they could have expected was that their insurance policy would respond in the manner that we would think it should.

How are market conditions?

Underwriter appetite is challenging – if you have anything with a client that is slightly out of the box, many insurers just can’t handle it. If you have a client in a high-risk occupation, their response to it is either just to say no or impose a massive deductible and increase the premiums.

There has been a lot of skill lost in underwriting. Every insurer is under-staffed at the moment which is directly impacting the service they provide. Even at the most basic level, it can be very challenging to get something done within a short timeframe.

A lot of the underwriters are like a lot of brokers where they’re struggling to get that middle level of employee.

Tell us about life outside work

I’m a husband and a father of a nearly 13 year old daughter. It’s great, dad is still cool at the moment – most of the time. We do a lot of things together, the three of us.

My sport of choice as a younger person, and still today, is Australian Rules.

It’s good fun, I’ve got the battle scars too. It could be partly my father’s lineage – that’s how my parents met, through Australian Rules because my dad came to Brisbane from Tasmania to play football in the 1960s. My mother is also a very, very avid supporter.