← The Edge of Risk Podcast by IRMI
The Edge of Risk Podcast by IRMI
Leverage Insurance Risk Engineers to Expose and Mitigate Construction Project Risks
00:08:46
Loading summary
Transcript5 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to the Edge of Risk podcast. I'm Joel Atelbom, the chief Content officer for ermi. We are very glad to have you join us today for the episode featuring Peter Buxtens, head of construction risk engineering at AXA XL. Originally presented as a snap talk at the 2025 Army Construction Risk Conference, Peter provides insights on how to leverage insurance risk engineers to expose and mitigate construction project risks. Listen in as Peter discusses how risk engineers assist in communicating exposures to underwriters and insureds to support best practices and ultimately enhance risk mitigation.
- [00:46]
B
It's actually working out pretty well to kind of be the last person speaking in this whole arena today because all of the topics that we talked about today, talking about wooden block. Yeah. We see risks with wood framing, mass timber, talked about the sifts and injuries. We see the slip strains, falls, falls from levels. That's one of our loss leaders when it comes to work comp. And then we also talked about the weather delays and we see a lot of scheduling issues when we're talking about subcontractor default insurance. So just a little bit about me and this is going to relate back to some of the things we're going to talk about with risk engineering. So I started in the construction industry about 27 years ago working for general contractor in the D.C. area in construction operations through project management, through executive leadership and started being involved in integrated services group. So really kind of worked kind of boots on the ground with our bim, our lead quality, our laser scanning, our field engineers really kind of looking for the support services for the construction operation teams. And I joined AXA about seven years ago. Now it will be seven years in a and now I'm heading up the team of risk engineers across our primary casualty, excess casualty, our energy transition builders, risk and SDI teams as well. And so I'm going to try to speak generally about risk engineering. My perspective is more about AXA and our approach with risk engineering. So I'm happy to take questions and maybe talk about any differences that people see. I always like to know who I'm talking with. But just with a quick show of hands, general contractors, trade partners. Okay. A few of them brokers, insurance carriers. Okay. All right, good. So a good mix.
- [02:19]
A
So.
- [02:19]
B
So we'll kind of talk a little bit about that. So I kind of started off with the idea of figuring out how to make this kind of like a book report. You know, five slides, 15 minutes I can talk and I already feel like I'm talking too much. But we are A team of construction professionals. The majority of our team come from operations backgrounds, safety professionals, certified safety professionals. We have a civil engineering training, we have a structural engineering training on our builders risk teams. We have folks from the quality management world, from trade contractors and general contractors. We source our team with the background of about 8 to 12 years of construction related experience. We're not hiring out of school, we're not hiring predominantly from the insurance world. We need that construction background and experience and mindset for our team. We get involved at the project level. We get involved in conference presentations like this through our thought leadership and knowledge sharing with not only our insured partners, but also with the industry. Because we know that even if we're not a current carrier for you, we like to help you because that's going to spin around and that's going to help your trade subcontractor partners and that's ultimately going to help us as an industry. We also get involved in a lot of higher level think meetings, presentations with CEOs, CFOs of companies really kind of focused on how to support the best practices, how to share our knowledge and our trends of what we're seeing. And I mentioned some of kind of our loss leaders that we see in our claims. We like to share our claim loss experiences, we like to share the trends, proactive measures that we can take to kind of help prevent these moving forward. So everything that we're doing there kind of on the left. That's our typical book of services that most engineering teams may be fair to say regardless of the carrier provides. It's a little jumbled, but the kind of the two in the middle, it's the site surveys and reviews, but there's benchmarking operational practices. So really kind of understanding the written programs, how a company operates is important because that allows us to be more comfortable with how things are managed in the field, how things are viewed, evaluated, assessed at the corporate level to make sure that there's oversight, appropriate oversight on the project levels. We do get involved with claims. You know, depending on the line of business, you may have a risk engineer at the carrier involved, you may have a third party involved, you may have a claims manager involved. But we like to know what's happening because we can take that information and share that back. There's a presentation yesterday talking about the gap in communications and they were talking about when, you know, going through the claims process, claims expertise and the claims resolution, discussing that and sharing that back with underwriters to make sure the underwriters understand kind of what the loss history is what's happened so they can write the policy. We like to be right in the middle of that. We like to understand it, we like to get out to the jobs, we like to see what it is. You know, we work with a lot of the broker loss, loss control consultants kind of walk hand in hand. And we also do a lot of joint visits even with our crossline customers. You might find that you'll have a risk engineer from the builder's risk, you might find a risk engineer from Casualty maybe coming out and visiting a project together. So there's a different perspective that we can provide. All of that information that we get and all of our observations we communicate to our underwriting team. And that has an impact on the endorsements, on the premium and on policy language. We also share that back to the customers. So we like to provide that a feedback back to help our customers get better, you know, through the risk mitigation recommendations and our claims data that we have. This is kind of the who, what, when, where. So this is the when, where and we'd like to get involved. Most risk engineers will get involved throughout the lifecycle at axa and this is kind of where that that specific piece is. Our risk engineering gets involved pre bind. So we will be involved in any submissions, all of the pre assessments, and we'll communicate kind of our evaluation of risk prior to underwriters binding any policies. We like to stay involved throughout the project lifecycle. We like to be out there during pre construction. We like to be out there during design meetings, onboarding meetings, team onboarding meetings, trade onboarding meetings. We really like to get out the job as much as possible because again, all of those observations that we see allows us to be more comfortable with the risks that the project is taking and then we can help support that risk that they're taking. And it kind of ties in with the gentleman that was Talking about the SIFs, through the pre construction piece, through the mentoring piece, and just kind of making that process elongated rather than as a spot in time. We also like to stay involved after the project's over, through the warranty period as well. We know that a lot of times the claims come into us from a, I'll call it day after the fact. You know, we see issues when they become big issues. And so a lot of engagement that we have is when the project is near completion or after the project is completed. And this is the why, you know, we really consider ourselves as partners with brokers, with trade partners, with general contractors. We like to be There every step of the way, we like to share our knowledge, our best practices, any lessons learned that we have, and it's not specific to the insured partner that we're working with. We'll share lessons learned and anonymize it appropriately from other experiences and other insureds and share that with insured that might be struggling with a similar thing. A recent project visit that I had, there was a contractor that was actually trying to figure out a new way to track deficiencies. And yeah, they're using Procore and all these different technologies, but we are able to kind of relate to them and understand why they're trying to track the deficiencies differently, trying to manage two different lists, which wasn't something that we really recommended, but to kind of share that experience of what someone may have tried in a previous project in a different geographic that works successfully that maybe they could consider trying. So it's not a definite recommendation of thou shalt do, but it's more of hey, did you ever consider this? And so that's the kind of information, the kind of customized solutions that we like to bring to the table. And really we're here to reduce the risk. I was joking with Rose earlier and she's like, hey, what are you talking about? And I was like, well, I'm talking about risk engineering. Use us like we're here, leverage our services, we can bring experience, we can bring support in ways that maybe company doesn't have or maybe enhance what the company is currently doing. And that was it. Thank you.
- [08:19]
A
We hope you have enjoyed this SNAP talk and thank you for listening to the Edge of Risk podcast. We invite you to plan on attending this year's Construction Risk Conference for more great content like this. They'll be held October 25th to the 29th of 2026 in Washington, BC. To learn more, go to ermi.com until next time. Thanks for listening.