Walk into a typical Indian boardroom and ask the question: how are we insured? You'll get an answer that lists policies. Property. Liability. Group health. Maybe D&O. Sums insured will be quoted, premiums will be totalled, and the conversation will move on.
What's almost never discussed is whether those policies — placed in isolation, often years apart, by different brokers chasing different commissions — actually align with how the business creates and loses value today.
Structural misalignment is the gap between the risks an enterprise actually carries and the risks its insurance programme is designed to absorb. It is rarely visible at placement. It surfaces at claim.
We see four recurring patterns. First, sums insured frozen at the level set when the policy was first written, despite construction-cost inflation that has compounded year after year. Second, business interruption indemnity periods of twelve months on plants that would realistically take eighteen to twenty-four months to rebuild and re-qualify with customers. Third, liability towers stacked without thought to how a single underlying loss could cascade across multiple policies — exhausting limits the board didn't realise were shared. Fourth, exclusions that have crept into renewal wordings without anyone in the finance team being told.
Fixing structural misalignment doesn't begin with a market exercise. It begins with a quiet, unhurried look at the business: revenue concentration, contractual exposures, replacement values, the realistic worst day. Only then does coverage design start. The market exercise comes last — and it is far more productive when the specification is clear and the broker is unconflicted.
If your renewal cycle starts and ends with quotation comparison, the alignment problem will outlive you. The board's question shouldn't be 'how much premium did we save?'. It should be 'what would we have collected if last year had gone wrong?'.
