Broadening the Horizon

Delegates attending the 2009 RIMS Canada Conference in St. John’s, Newfoundland this upcoming September will be witness to a spectrum of education topics as broad as the industry experience of the co-chairs putting the education program together.

RIMS Canada Conference co-chairs Marilyn Leonard and Elizabeth (Betty) Clarke together have a combined 50-plus years of experience in the insurance and risk management field.

Leonard began her professional life as an English teacher. She moved to the city in the mid-1970s and a friend who owned an insurance agency asked if she would be interested in doing some claims work. “Once I got there, I enjoyed the work, Leonard says. “I started to take courses towards my associateship and my broker’s certificate just to pass the time.”

She became the supervisor of commercial insurance in less than 10 years, and then applied for a job with the provincial Treasury Board section as an insurance officer. In the interim, she was very involved with the Insurance Institute. “When the government job came around, I saw it as a great opportunity to take my insurance background and combine it with my educational background and that sort of gave me the edge for this job, because they needed somebody who not only could handle negotiating an insurance program, but also write Treasury Board papers and Cabinet papers.”

Twelve years later, in 1999, when St. John’s last hosted the RIMS Canada Conference, Leonard moved on to join Aon Reed Stenhouse. She was hired to provide brokerage services to the large, risk-managed accounts in Aon’s office.

Her client list included Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, a Crown corporation where she works now, and where she started working in early 2005.

Clarke’s professional background in 1970s includes a stint working at a hospital. She saw an ad in the paper for a receptionist at Sovereign General, which was then known as The Merit Insurance Company.

“I had to go do a test, a skill test, and I did extremely well at the test, apparently, because they offered me a better position than was offered at the beginning,” Clarke says. “They were just looking for a receptionist and I ended up being an insurance renewal clerk right away.”

She says she enjoyed the work so much that she accepted a management position at the Insurance Corporation of Newfoundland within a few years. She became the vice president of underwriting there, before accepting the additional role of vice president of administration with Anthony Insurance, the brokerage arm of the Insurance Corporation of Newfoundland.

“I sort of had to wear two hats, because I had people who were doing sales and I was responsible for the sales being up, but I was also responsible for sales being the type of sales we wanted — we didn’t want bad business coming through the door,” she says. [To clarify: she was not directly accountable for the sales numbers.]

While at Anthony Insurance, she traveled to meet her contacts with Anthony Insurance in Toronto. She eventually moved to Toronto in 1999. She started contract work with Baird MacGregor Insurance Brokers, which eventually became full-time work at their Mississauga office. She then joined HKMB, where as an account manager she assisted transportation companies with risk management tips. “That’s where I decided that risk management would be my next step,” she says.

Itching to get back home to Newfoundland, she took a risk manager role at Fishery Products International in 2003. At the behest of fellow RIMS colleague Craig Rowe, who is now the president and CEO of the risk management company Clear Risk, Clarke took on her current role as risk manager and business continuity coordinator at the City of St. John’s.

Both Leonard and Clarke came to RIMS by way of their careers.

Leonard was heavily involved in the 1999 RIMS Canada Conference in St. John’s as a program chair. She later had a five-year hiatus from RIMS and re-joined when she went to Newfoundland Hydro in 2005.

As for Clarke, she is the immediate past president of the Insurance Institute of Newfoundland, as well as a member of the national education committee of RIMS. She is currently on the executive of the RIMS Canada Council.

Not surprisingly, the 2009 RIMS Canada Conference on the eastern coast will have a nautical theme. The gala will be held in a conference centre with a capacity of more than 1,200 people. The room for the gala is being prepared to make delegates feel like they are on a cruise ship, with screens around the room giving the appearance that the boat is sailing into various scenic ports and locations. The theme of the conference is “Charting the Course: Navigating Your Risk.”

The conference will feature four plenary sessions and 25 concurrent sessions within a period of two and a half days.

Leonard described the concurrent session count as being “on the high side.” But one thing the co-chairs wanted to accomplish was a broad smattering of topics that would appeal to all walks of risk managers.

“There are a lot of different perspectives [represented by RIMS],” Clarke says. “You can have 100 risk managers and probably every one of them is doing something different. It depends on what your goals are, what your company does and all that kind of stuff.”

Reflecting RIMS’ diversity as an organization, the 2009 conference will address many industry fields and hot-button topics. They are expected to include practical tips on how to build an enterprise risk management (ERM) program, risk management in the oil and gas sectors, loss control, customer liability in the retail sectors, technology for risk managers, marine issues, business continuity, climate change, corruption and fraud, manufacturing and public entities such as municipalities.

The key is that the breadth should be accompanied by depth. The idea is to focus the content of the education sessions so that they offer specific, concrete ideas for application by risk managers. Leonard says the ERM session is an example.

“Enterprise risk management, that’s been kicking around for a number of years,” Leonard noted. “A lot of risk managers now have been on the fringe of getting this started and working on it, trying to sell it to their bosses. Right now, I think people want more in-depth knowledge from risk managers that have succeeded — how they’ve done it, how they tried to get it started and how they implemented it….I think we need to have some seasoned risk managers share their experience and answer those questions.”

Not to say the conference will be all work and no play. Local entertainment has been planned to appear throughout the conference and all hands will be on deck to hear from keynote speakers such as retired chief of defence staff Richard Hillier, journalist Gwynne Dyer, local university professor (and murder mystery novelist) Elliot Leyton and journalist Rex Murphy.

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“Right now, I think people want more in-depth knowledge from risk managers that have succeeded [in establishing ERM programs] — how they’ve done it, how they tried to get it started and how they implemented it.”