Navigating Risk

In the early 1790s, Royal Navy Captain George Vancouver faced numerous risks, including disease and conflict, while mapping the west coast of North America.

Two centuries later, the risks of marine travel off the British Columbia coast may be different, but the Risk and Insurance Management Society (RIMS) Canada is incorporating the name of Vancouver’s ship, Discovery, into the theme of its annual conference, set for October 6 to 9 in Victoria.

“Our conference is intended to focus on exploration and discovery for all attendees,” says Dan Heaman, co-chair of the RIMS Canada conference. “We’re drawing up the theme of discovery,” says Heaman, director of risk management and insurance for Central 1 Credit Union in Vancouver.

The course being charted is to book plenary speakers who will “share their discoveries” in risk management with people attending this year’s conference, he says.

“Our goal is to identify new challenges on the horizon for risk managers and assist them as they sail into the future, navigating obstacles and spying out for opportunities,” Heaman says of this year’s conference program. “Essentially, we’re going to do that with sessions that help them navigate and identify issues on the horizon.”

Although the conference will not necessarily focus on marine risks, Heaman’s co-chair, Steve Matterson, has become familiar with marine risks in his current day job, as director of risk and insurance at Victoria-based British Columbia Ferry Services Inc. B.C. Ferries provides service, shuttling people and cars mostly between Vancouver Island and the mainland, on 25 routes among 47 terminals. The largest vessels in its fleet are capable of carrying 2,100 people and 470 vehicles.

“When you’re dealing with transporting people back and forth on ferries… a lot of the general risks are the same that most companies face,” Matterson points out. “We just face some that are on top of water and some that are on top of land.”

Matterson has had some hands-on experience with risk. Before joining B.C. Ferries in 2005, he worked on the mainland as a risk manager for the City of Surrey. At the same time, he was a paid on-call firefighter for the Township of Langley, east of Surrey, which used on-call firefighters as first responders since it did not have full-time firefighters at the time.

“The two of them go hand in hand,” Matterson says of his past roles as full-time city employee and part-time firefighter. “I’ve been out there and I’ve seen the actual damage. It’s not theoretical to me. I’ve seen the consequences, which helps me to explain to people… why we want to put prevention into place.”

Matterson took economics at the University of Victoria before beginning work life as a computer salesperson in the early 1980s and then moving to Hudson’s Bay Company as a manager. His foray into insurance began with an auto claims adjusting position at the Insurance Corporation of B.C. (ICBC). “This was not a career path I selected,” he says of insurance and risk. “Like many, it kind of chose me.”

After seven years at ICBC, Matterson moved to the City of Surrey, initially working in claims. “Soon after I started, loss prevention became part of my responsibilities, in part because I was a volunteer firefighter,” he relays, adding his firefighting duties have taught him “the need and benefits of being prepared to respond to an incident.”

Matterson got his Fellow Chartered Insurance Professional (FCIP) qualification in 1997 from the Insurance Institute of Canada and attained a Fellowship in Risk Management from RIMS. He also became actively involved in RIMS Canada at that time, helping the chair of a western RIMS conference. He has been on the executive of RIMS Canada’s B.C. chapter, BCRIMA, as treasurer, vice president and then as president in 2007-2008.

“The number of risk managers in any one company tends to be small. I’ve worked in groups of three or four in different areas of my career. RIMS gives that much larger network when you’re looking for someone else to talk something through,” Matterson says.

Like Matterson, Heaman has been BCRIMA’s treasurer and chapter president in 2002-2003, and also served as chairperson for the RIMS Western Regional Conference Delegates Committee from 2009 until 2011. “I find that RIMS provides risk managers with outstanding opportunities to network with their peers, to learn from colleagues and to stay on the leading edge of risk management knowledge and the ability to deal with arising risk management issues,” Heaman says.

Again like Matterson, he did not initially set his sights on a career in insurance. He studied geography at the University of Victoria in the early 1980s, graduating in the midst of a “significant recession.” A career in the resource industry at the time was “not an option,” he says.

Instead, Heaman began his career in claims with Continental Canada Insurance Company Ltd., which later became Lombard General Insurance Company of Canada, now owned by Northbridge Financial Corp. “It seemed a natural progression to have a career in the insurance industry grow into working in risk management, managing claims within a risk management department on the demand side of the industry,” he says.

Heaman has since attained the FCIP qualification and the Canadian Risk Management (CRM) designation. In his current job at Central 1 Credit Union, where he has worked since 1995, his responsibilities have grown steadily. Initially, Heaman was a claims manager for its captive and risk finance program; now he oversees the claims, underwriting and fraud prevention groups.

For client credit unions, Central 1 provides both risk management and loss control services, Heaman says, adding that he has certainly seen some changes over the years. He sees as the biggest challenge, whether an organization is public or private, “the recognition of the importance of applying enterprise risk management across the organization to make sure that the organization or the company can meet its objectives, identify obstacles to those objectives, overcome those obstacles and identify opportunities.”

Offers Heaman, “The recognition of the role of risk management to an organization’s success has never been more pre-eminent, and I think that’s a really good development.” RIMS can certainly help in that regard by providing a means for risk managers to network with their peers and learn from colleagues.

“When risk managers attend risk management conferences and they hear from speakers of enterprise risk management, their preference tends to be hearing from risk managers who have encountered their own obstacles and challenges in implementing risk management and share their successes and share their lessons learned,” he says.

“They generally range from establishing an enterprise risk management culture, from the top to the bottom of the organization, delivering success with enterprise risk management, showing value throughout the organization and identifying fast, emerging issues, which, if not threats to the organization, are significant challenges that need to be addressed by risk managers,” he adds.

To respond to these challenges, Heaman suggests risk managers need to have a sense of direction, which is why he and Matterson are incorporating a compass into the logo of this year’s conference. The event will be held at the Victoria Conference Centre, not far from the BlackBall Ferry terminal, which provides passenger service across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the United States, over part of the area that Captain George Vancouver explored two centuries ago.

Heaman makes a pledge: “The conference will offer opportunities for discovery for all levels of risk managers, whether they be novice sailors or admirals of their fleets.”