Directors & Officers (D&O) Insurance provides important liability protection to those running a company or organisation.
QBE is launching a new and improved D&O Insurance product. The wording is in plain English and the product is supported by a local claims team and accessible specialist underwriters.
The team is led by Scott Luxford, QBE’s National Manager Financial Lines and Agencies, who has 30 years of experience in insurance, including almost 20 years focusing on the Financial Lines world.
From his start in London, Luxford now runs two important portfolios at QBE – Agency and Financial Lines. He answered some questions about the D&O product, our approach and the team.
What is Directors and Officers (D&O) Insurance?
D&O is designed to protect the personal assets of a Director and Officer for the decisions they make as part of their Director (or Officer’s) duties in running a company. It covers a broad amount of liability, ranging from legal representation costs for regulatory investigations to securities class actions.
What can we expect from your new D&O product, what are the improvements and how does it compare to the market?
Our wording is designed for customers in the mid-market space. The product covers all major insuring clauses and offers a broad suite of endorsements, sub-limits and coverage.
Brokers can expect sharp service, underwriters who know the product and can answer your queries, straightforward policy wordings written in plain English, as well as a local claims team who will support customers through the claims process.
D&O Insurance is available to a huge range of businesses, where will your focus be?
Based on the current macroeconomic climate, we’re targeting opportunities in the mid-market space. Predominantly our primary capacity is for private companies however we can also consider public companies. We’re comfortable quoting primary or excess opportunities.
Given the economic environment, is D&O a hard to write product?
D&O can be a challenging product to decipher, but like all Financial Lines product classes the more time you spend on it, the greater your understanding. We’re fortunate to have a widely experienced underwriting team of specialists that focus on D&O.
A key consideration to underwriting D&O is access to public information, such as online analyst reports, ASX announcements, visualisation tools or databases such as Simply Wall Street, Salesforce and IBIS World, which can assist our underwriting.
What should brokers do if they have an opportunity and want to discuss D&O further?
We have made that easy: contact our team through Scott Luxford, or of course please feel free to reach out to your QBE relationship manager. We are working on our pipeline right now so please get in touch with us now or down the track as we are available and keen to chat.
What else is in the pipeline for QBE’s Financial Lines and Agencies team?
It’s a really exciting time for us in Financial Lines. We’re an established market in this space and have a great team. We’re challenging ourselves to reinvigorate our product suite and making sure that we make ourselves available to you, our broking partners.
We’re planning on bringing some more new products to market over the coming months. Thanks for your ongoing support and we are really look forward to trading with you in the Financial Lines space.