CFO, legal or IT · the person holding the risk register
The claim that hurts most is the one nobody was asked to budget for.
Last reviewed:
Directors and officers, professional indemnity, cyber, general liability, property, goods in transit. These sit outside the benefits conversation, get renewed on autopilot, and turn entirely on wording that only ever gets read after the event that needed it.
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20 minutes with a Growth Advisor. No obligation, and no quote pushed.
The problem with these covers
Group health gets attention because employees ask about it every week. Commercial cover gets attention twice: on the day a customer contract demands a certificate, and on the day a notice arrives. In between it renews quietly, at a business that has changed a great deal since the wording was chosen.
Nothing on this page is a product pitch. It is the list of questions worth putting to whoever placed your cover, including us.
Five things worth checking this quarter
- The retroactive date on your professional indemnity. Cover is written on a claims-made basis, so work done before that date usually falls outside it. Changing insurer without carrying the date forward can delete years of protection without anyone noticing until a claim reaches back.
- Whether your customer contract and your policy actually agree. Enterprise customers write insurance clauses that name limits, cover types and sometimes specific extensions. Holding a policy with the right name on it is not the same as meeting the clause, and this is the single most common mismatch we find.
- What triggers your D&O. An enquiry is not an allegation, but many wordings respond to a regulatory investigation long before anything is proved, and the defence cost usually arrives before the outcome does.
- What your cyber policy does about regulation, not just ransoms. Wordings differ widely on investigation costs, regulatory response and what happens under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act. Insurers increasingly ask about controls such as multi-factor authentication and backups before they will quote at all.
- Whether property and transit values have kept up with the business. Sums insured set three years ago describe a company that no longer exists, and under-insurance is discovered at settlement rather than at renewal.
Sector matters here. Technology and services businesses tend to be exposed on professional indemnity and cyber written into customer contracts. Financial services see more on directors and officers and on crime. Manufacturing and logistics concentrate on property, transit and liability.
What each cover is really for
| Cover | Responds to | The wording question |
|---|---|---|
| Directors & officers | Claims and investigations against individual directors and officers | Does it respond to an investigation, and is there cover if the company cannot indemnify? |
| Professional indemnity | Alleged errors, omissions or negligence in the service you sell | What is the retroactive date, and does the definition of professional services match what you actually do now? |
| Cyber | Incident response, business interruption, third-party liability and regulatory exposure | What conditions does the insurer attach on controls, and what is excluded once they are not met? |
| Commercial general liability | Third-party injury and property damage arising from operations | Are your premises, products and contractual liabilities all inside it? |
| Property and fire | Damage to buildings, plant, stock and the interruption that follows | Are sums insured current, and is business interruption sized on a realistic recovery period? |
| Marine and transit | Goods moving by sea, air, road or rail | Where does cover begin and end, and who carries the risk at each handover? |
Category level and insurer-agnostic. What a policy pays always depends on its wording, and nothing here is a recommendation of a specific policy.
Directors & Officers · Professional indemnity · Cyber · Commercial general liability · Fire · Marine and transit · Workmen’s compensation
Where we start
- Read the contracts, then the policies. The insurance clauses in your three largest customer agreements, against what you actually hold. Mismatches here block onboarding and are cheap to fix in advance.
- Map the register to the wordings. Take the risks your own register already names, and mark which policy responds to each. The blanks are the conversation.
- Check the dates and the values. Retroactive dates, sums insured, business interruption periods, and anything set before the last two years of growth.
- Place or correct, then defend. Where a gap needs filling we place it. Where a claim arrives, it comes to our team before the insurer sees it, the same way a health claim does.
If a customer contract is the reason this is on your desk this week, send the insurance clause. That is usually a same-week answer rather than a project.
Proof, in public
The same claim-first model applies to commercial lines. A liability or indemnity claim is slower and more document-heavy than a hospital claim, and the difference a broker makes is the same: whether someone reads the file properly on your side of the table before it is decided.
Much of the review writing is people thanking an Ethika person by name.
Bootstrapped from day one and profitable from year one. No insurer above us and no investor behind us, which is the structural reason a recommendation can be independent rather than merely described that way.
20 minutes with a Growth Advisor. No obligation.
Common questions
When does a D&O policy actually respond?
Why does the retroactive date matter so much on professional indemnity?
Does cyber insurance deal with a data protection problem?
Our customer contract asks for specific cover. Can you check whether we have it?
Do we have to move all our cover to you to get this reviewed?
The wording is the product
Two policies with the same name and the same limit can behave completely differently on the day one of them is tested. That difference is the entire job.
What happens when you talk to us
A 20-minute video call with a Growth Advisor. No obligation and no quote pushed. In that first call we usually look at:
- What your customer contracts demand, against what you hold
- Retroactive dates, triggers and the exclusions that would decide a real claim
- Whether sums insured and interruption periods still describe your business
- Which risks on your own register currently have no policy against them
You will leave with an honest read on your commercial cover, and a straight answer on whether we can genuinely help.
20 minutes with a Growth Advisor. No obligation.
A note on this page. This page is general information about how cover and claims work for companies like yours. It is not insurance, legal, financial or tax advice, and nothing on it is an offer of cover. What is right for your company is determined through a conversation and the formal placement process. Outcomes on any claim depend on the individual policy terms.
Sources. Company figures are stated as published. Market figures are named with their source and year; no data published by a competing broker, benefits consultant or benefits platform is cited. Statutory positions are described in general terms.
Ethika Insurance Broking Pvt Ltd · IRDAI-licensed Direct Insurance Broker (Life & General), Certificate No. 574, licence dated 8 August 2016, valid till 7 August 2028 · CIN U66030TG2015PTC099365 · Principal Officer: Sandeep Mukka · Member, Insurance Brokers Association of India (IBAI). Insurance is the subject matter of solicitation.
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