Matt Harrell, CIC
Managing Director of National Accounts,
Franklin Street Insurance
Tampa, Florida

Time at company: 7.5 years.

Choosing a client-facing path: At Florida State University, I was not an insurance major at first. I was MIS (management information systems) back then, until I realized I wanted to get into something that was client-facing. I saw that Florida State had one of the top insurance programs in the country. I graduated in 2004 with a double major in risk management and insurance, and finance. People laugh that I left computer programming because it was boring — but that I got into insurance. They don't understand the industry.

Finding solutions in the face of serious loss: After graduation, I worked for Willis in Miami in its marketing analyst program. I did that for a year and-a-half, and then transferred to Willis in Tampa to become a producer. This was right around when all of the hurricanes were happening. Not only high damage and destruction, but also high frequency of those storms. It really turned the property insurance market upside down, but gave us an opportunity to come up with creative solutions for problems that property managers were facing at the time. We dove into cat modeling — which is much more prevalent now than it was then — to create policies for their portfolios.

How due diligence can pay off: At Franklin Street, recently we were working on a large multifamily portfolio of locations in the southeast. I looked at the property loss runs, and they were not good at all. They had high loss frequency with an 80 percent loss ratio. Most brokers send those loss runs out to the carriers and hope for the best. But we looked at what those losses are, and found the cause of claims for the past five years. A lot of them were pipes that had frozen due to weather, which then leaked. We dug down into the details, and were able to demonstrate that 60 percent of those losses had occurred more than three years ago, because the property owner put forth an installation program to insulate the pipes and prevent them from freezing in the first place. We took that information to the carriers. We anticipated a flat to 5 percent increase in coverage costs, but were able to get, including the General Liability, a 15 percent decrease.

Why splitting risks can make sense: The property portfolio is really going to dictate what insurance market we will go to — are they in cat areas, are the properties subject to earthquake or hail claims? Most brokers assume they should group the entire portfolio together, but through analysis we can determine if it makes sense to split the portfolio — maybe all Florida locations with one carrier, and frame locations with another.

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