Whether you're a small start-up or a large corporation, protecting your business with the right kind of insurance is essential. But how do you make sure that you have the correct coverage for your company's needs? In this article, we'll break down the different types of business insurance and explain them in an easy-to-understand way.
What is Business Insurance?
Business insurance is a type of insurance that helps protect businesses from financial losses. It can cover things like property damage, liability, and even lost income. Businesses can purchase insurance policies to help protect themselves from a variety of risks, including fire, theft, and lawsuits.
There are many different types of business insurance, and the coverage you need will depend on the type of business you have. For example, if you own a manufacturing company, you might need property insurance to protect your equipment and buildings. If you run a service business, you might need liability insurance to protect yourself from lawsuits. It's important to have the right coverage in place to protect your business from potentially devastating losses.
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History of Business Insurance
Business insurance has its origins in Great Britain, where it was formalized around 17th-century merchants who were transporting and trading goods overseas. Underwriting perils through a central organization and sharing the financial burden through fees (insurance premiums) minimized the risks of sailing; this included merchants' assets as well as their business risks.
These assets and liabilities can vary from company to company and industry to industry. Over the years commercial insurance has become more sophisticated and attuned to the shift with the emerging industries and evolved risks.
Types of assets and liabilities business insurance:
Examples: -
Case of a Disruptive Tech/SAAS company
Liability: The services rendered to their clients did not perform as expected, causing losses to the clients. Any type of financial loss to a company due to cyber attacks or employee fraud.
Asset: Physical assets like office premises, and company laptops, can be at risk of being damaged or stolen.
This is just scratching the surface really; as a company grows, all founders and the leadership team would agree that the systems get complex making businesses susceptible to loopholes & errors. Business insurance acknowledges the need to keep systems watertight to keep the company stay afloat.
Risks many times have a snowball effect, and business insurance has been carefully crafted keeping all corner cases and consequences of perils in mind.
For a business leader, insuring their business is ensuring the success of their business in good times and bad times.
When Plan A fails…
At a macro level, these risks and financial strain have gone to an extent that the companies and individuals have gone bankrupt ultimately penalizing the economy and livelihoods of not just the founders but the key decision makers, investors and employees too.
At a micro level, the companies lose the pace of growth with the sudden loss of capital, inconsistent balance sheets, losing credibility from clients, piling lawsuits from clients, vendors, unfavourable acquisitions, etc. A domino effect comes into action.
Solution: -
Now we know what the perils and risks of businesses are, let us talk about what part does business insurance play?
Business insurance helps a company utilize the sum insured in place of their own funds to appoint a top-notch lawyer to defend, run an investigation, publish a notification to the stakeholders, replace or repair the lost or damaged assets, compensate the party alleging loss as directed by the court of law and much more. In short, they use this sum insured in place of their own hard-earned funds. Keeping the capital outflow in check.
Regulators & Investors’ View: -
SEBI in its latest amendment encouraged companies and mandated listed companies to take a few critical insurances like Directors and officers insurance. Few western countries make many of these business liability insurances mandatory from the time of company inception.
For the same reasons, business insurances feature in term sheets of investors and contracts of global commercial clients like commercial general liability, directors and officers, and errors and omissions.
Future of Business Insurance: -
Just the global liability insurance market, which protects businesses from liabilities (General Liability Insurance, Professional Liability Insurance, Insurance for Directors and Officers, etc.) is projected to reach $432.81 billion by 2031, growing at a CAGR of 5.7% from 2022 to 2031.
Reason: -
The soaring risks of companies with an increase in the rate of information cross-border commerce, awareness, technological advancement, operational dependencies, pro-consumer judiciary, and every inevitable risk which is a part and parcel of today's growth story. For example, as per the Allianz report “Cyber is the top risk for the fifth year in a row” for India specifically and overall the cyber risk has increased by 44% from 2021 as per Allianz Risk Report. The top reasons are an Increase in ransomware attacks, Data breaches, IT vulnerability due to growth in remote working, Disruption from the failure of digital supply chains, and cloud technology service platforms.
For more information about business insurance, check out the digital insurance platform offered by BimaKavach.
