Vancouver’s chief risk officer worked for both NATO and the Olympic Games before taking on his current role managing the city’s risk profile – an impressive CV by any standard.
After beginning his career in the UK cabinet office, Robert Bartlett worked for NATO focusing on risk and crisis communications, before seconding to Vancouver to advise on Olympic security, heading back to London as a program manager for the city’s Olympic Games, and finally being offered the job as Vancouver’s first chief risk officer.
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His role, Bartlett told
Insurance Business, is to look at all aspects of Vancouver’s businesses and decide “which are the ones we can focus on.”
In the three years since he took on the role, the city has implemented a comprehensive program of risk management overseeing hundreds of risks.
Among those many risks, one of the most important is continuity of operations: “How do you make sure that your operations can continue if you have a flood in a building, or if you have a power outage for a few days, or a larger disruption, like a king tide, or heaven forbid, an earthquake?” he said.
When it comes to insurance, the city goes out to market via an insurance broker, renewing every three years.
“We specifically look to assess whether or not that insurance company, and the insurance broker, is good enough for us,” Bartlett explained.
“We really look at other factors than just price,” he said. Chiefly, the level of expertise and how the insurer interacts: “We need people that are able to answer the phone, understand the critical issues that we’re going through, work and be on our side.”
As a public body, it’s also important that the insurer can provide what the municipality needs to make sure that it is transparent with the money it spends “both in terms of insurance premium, and what we do with the replacement costs when we get that money back.”
“Our current insurance broker really understands what we need – we need an immediate service, we need expertise… we don’t want to be dealing with people outside of the area,” he said. “We need local people to deal with our local problems.”
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