Global shipping chokepoints, such as the Strait of Hormuz, continue to highlight just how complex marine risk can be. In insurance terms, that complexity is exactly why underwriters say the line of business resists portal-style underwriting.
“Marine is many things,” said Michael Wright (pictured), head of marine at HDI Global SE – Canada. “But it’s not portal-friendly, it’s not ‘ask five questions and be done with the policy’”.
Wright argued that the complexity of cargo movements – different modes, routes, commodities, contracts and legal regimes – means brokers play an outsized role in whether clients end up properly protected.
“As an underwriter, I do not have a license to deal with the insurance-buying public directly in any province or any state. I cannot provide advice to them. I work exclusively with an insurance broker,” he said. “So I need to rely on the insurance broker’s understanding of their client’s risk. I need to also rely on the insurance broker’s ability to properly represent that risk to me… I only know what I’m told at the end of the day.”
To address that, Wright said HDI is investing in structured broker education rather than assuming the market will pick up the nuances on its own.
He said HDI is rolling out a broker education initiative – a continuing‑education program built around a one-hour seminar on selling transit insurance, including what questions to ask, how to handle objections, and how to respond when clients say things that might throw a broker off.
“Our success in the Canadian market is our brokers’ success – their knowledge, their confidence, and their ability to ask the right questions,” he added.
The gaps he sees most often start with basic definitions.
He said that when a client tells a broker “I have a cargo policy,” the first question should be what that actually covers – is it an inland policy, a storage policy, a freight liability policy? In his view, many of the real gaps arise simply because the policy type doesn’t match the exposure, a problem that will only grow as Canada’s trade shifts from the United States to the rest of the world.
Wright, who spent a decade as a broker earlier in his career, is blunt about the commercial realities that can discourage thorough questioning.
“Clients don’t have a lot of time for insurance,” he said. “Insurance to them is an expense… there’s no value to it unless they purchase a certain policy type. And of course, everybody has had a bad experience with insurance.”
That gives time‑pressed executives little patience for deeper risk discovery.
He said one of the difficulties for many insurance brokers is that they only get a brief opportunity with the client, whether it’s a new prospect or a renewal, and that client may simultaneously be speaking with another broker in search of a better price. That competing broker might have little or no expertise in marine and may not ask the right questions, but can still win the business by keeping the conversation simpler.
Faced with that, he said, decision‑makers often gravitate to the path of least resistance.
“When you’re dealing with a CEO, a CFO, a COO, they’re very busy. They don’t have a lot of time for you,” he said. “So they might just say to a broker that’s trying to do the right job, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have time,’ and they’ll go to the broker that’s asking fewer questions. That has happened to me far too many times as a broker.”
The result is a delicate balancing act.
He said the goal is to build enough trust to tell a client, in effect, that they do have an exposure and it needs to be understood properly, and that if the client is willing to engage, broker and underwriter can work together to get as close as possible to a product that truly protects them. Sometimes that approach succeeds, he added, but unfortunately not always.
For Wright, the push to educate brokers is rooted in a simple distinction: property risks are largely static; marine risks move.
He said that, by contrast, property insurance is relatively straightforward because it typically covers a building – and most buildings are broadly similar from a risk perspective.
By contrast, cargo and marine liability exposures change constantly.
“When you’re insuring cargo or insuring cargo liability or marine liability, it’s different from risk to risk,” he said. “The risk is exercised every single moment. If a shipment is moving, there’s a risk – but that can change.”
A freight forwarder, for example, may be arranging truck moves, warehousing, trans‑loading or export bookings, each with a different profile.
“That changes all the time, so it is a little bit more complex,” Wright said. “That’s why I like to believe that people who enter the marine realm of insurance are far more situationally aware of what’s happening in their world.”
When he trains staff, he expects them to look well beyond policy wordings.
“I train them to learn everything about everything,” he said. “Learn about geopolitics, learn about commodity types, learn about ports, countries, learn about OFAC, learn about NAFTA, learn about CUSMA.”
For brokers, the implication is that in a line of business where risk changes with every movement, the value is no longer in simply placing capacity - it’s in knowing which questions to ask, and insisting on asking them even when the client would prefer a quicker conversation.
