Founded in 1833, Copenhagen-based Svitzer is the world’s oldest salvage company. Starting with wooden boats to tow ships and barges, it is now present in 35 countries and has almost 3,000 employees worldwide. Rikke Brundbjerg works in Svitzer Group Insurance. Part of her responsibility is keeping track of all the company’s worldwide insurance policies and ensuring that they are dealt with directly from the head office. Here, Brundbjerg discusses how AonLine, Aon’s Web-based risk-management service, has become an integral part of the process.

ONE: What has been the greatest benefit of using AonLine?

Rikke Brundbjerg: Prior to AonLine, we kept hard copies of insurance policies at our head office. At renewal, we used to have three copies of every single insurance policy, both for vessels and non-marine. AonLine assists us in distributing and keeping track of our various insurance policies throughout the world. We now have 600 vessels and we aim to grow constantly. In total, there are six different policies for each vessel, including hull and machinery insurance, war risk insurance, and protection and indemnity insurance. Having all these in hard copy takes up quite a lot of storage space, plus it is very time- consuming to do all the filing and searching by hand. Having the policies online not only saves a lot of paper, it is also much easier and faster to access them. Now we are only three clicks away.

ONE: Besides eliminating paper, how else have you applied AonLine features?

RB: When you are a global company, it is difficult to ensure that people have access to all insurance policies; with AonLine we can keep track and ensure that each policy has been received and is accessible at all times. In my job, it means that I always have access to all of our policies, regardless of where I am in the world. AonLine also tracks any changes to the policies without deleting the previous version. We can go back and see when the changes happened and who made them. Plus, with our constant growth, AonLine has enabled us to get insurance policies out quickly; previously, it took weeks or even months for a policy to arrive at its final destination. Now, we receive the PDF file from the insurance company and it can be uploaded the same day.

We started out only wanting to have Aon policies on AonLine, but we like the product so much that we are using it for everything. We are constantly finding new things that we can use it for—it is brilliant.

ONE: Are there any problems unique to your business that AonLine addresses?

RB: On the marine side, you always need to have copies of the policies on the vessels. Previously, problems occurred when vessels were working on contracts away from regional offices and not necessarily in a harbor. Now the captains can access the insurance documents if asked by the authorities, which any harbor is allowed to do. In theory, a captain on one of our vessels in the South China Sea could be using AonLine.

ONE: Were there particular criteria you were interested in when seeking an online solution?

RB: For us, it was really important that it be easily accessible and something that people could use without being a rocket scientist. We wanted people not just to have it, but also to use it. Globally, we have about 100 users. We recently learned about the global insurance guide on AonLine, which has been really worthwhile. When we consider going into new regions where we don’t know the insurance legislation, or where we have a presence but the authorities are bad at keeping us informed, it can be difficult for us to obtain the information. AonLine gives us that information via the global guide. Our business-development team is also thrilled, as it will greatly ease their workload because they no longer have to chase authorities—they can now go in and access the information themselves.

If you have to wait for people to get things done, you tend to get impatient—especially if it’s urgent—but using AonLine means that you can take care of it yourself. It’s so flexible that I don’t even have to be in the office—I can use it just as easily at the airport.