Corporate customs brokerages and freight forwarders would know that one essential part of running our business is that we need to have Professional Indemnity Insurance (PII). We were covered by Zurich Australian Insurance Limited (ZAII) for at least the past fourteen (14) years. When it was time to renew our policy this year, we were advised that ZAII could no longer cover our worldwide operations and that they could only cover our Australian operations. We have never had a claim in twenty three (23) years. We were advised that an option was to delete all of our worldwide operations from the policy or go to another insurer.
We went to another insurer and our quoted premium was 400% higher than the previous years premium.
We reached out to the CEO of ZAII (twice) to express our disappointment that they never advised us earlier; subsequently we never received a reply.
Our new insurer in the recent week reported a $10 billion dollar quarterly profit. I guess if your customers are low risk [or even no risk] that charging premiums 400% higher than the previous standard rate is going to be easy money.
Operating a corporate customs brokerage and a freight forwarding business continues to be a challenging operation.