For brokers, that has some practical implications. Submissions need to work harder. Clients with exposure in southern Europe, hotel groups, agricultural operators, second-home owners and tour operators, should expect underwriters to ask more granular questions about vegetation clearance, building materials and defensible space around structures than they did two or three years ago. Brokers who can bring geospatial risk data to a submission, rather than leaving underwriters to assume the worst, are likely to get better terms for their clients. Behaviour matters too. David Williams, Willis’s senior director of alternative risk transfer solutions, has noted that in fire-prone markets like Australia and California, “people have been told about this risk for a very long time, and their behaviour changes during bad weather days to try to stop ignitions happening”, a discipline that hasn’t caught on to the same degree among UK or European clients yet.
