Lion City, here I come… a Singapore secondment experience

“Do you speak Mandarin? “

“How do you feel about helping out with a few claims over here in Asia?”

Two innocent questions to which I simply responded, “Yes, and sure. What’s up?”  That led to a few interesting phone calls followed by a hastily planned travel arrangements, and within 4 days, I was on a flight out to Singapore, on Sunday 30^th January, for what turned out to be a 10-week secondment (including a holiday) to our Singapore office, under the mentorship of our ‘amazing’ Asia Regional Managing Director, Tony Chapman.

As it turned out, the timing of the start of this secondment coincided with the Chinese New Year. Seeing that I am a Singaporean who’s been living and working in London for the past 30 years, I never really had the chance to spend a proper Chinese New Year with my parents and relatives who were all in Singapore. Integra was incredibly generous in allowing this “local expat” time off to see the folks before all the action began!

And what action there was.

Straight off the bat were three big claims, two of which required me to liaise and coordinate with Chinese insureds: a transformer failure claim from Chinese contractors/ project owners of a power plant in Vietnam with potential to be close to USD100million; a potential policy limit loss for a  Political Violence claim following a major power interruption to a refinery in Myanmar (again a USD100million loss); and finally a product recall claim with a media publicised value of USD1.8billion in North Asia. 

Challenges that needed addressing ranged from co-ordinating IRIS (Integra Remote Inspection Solution) live-call sessions in Myanmar with China and Europe, managing Chinese insureds and brokers, to working on a loss mitigation program with potential sanctions concerns… which eventually materialised, and we had to “down pens” on the claim!

Then there were logistical challenges in sorting out ever-changing Covid travel restrictions to get ourselves out on site in Vietnam for a long delayed five-day root cause investigation program.

Just when I thought things were starting to calm down and run smoothly, a major client activated an instruction under our IRIS triage program following the rain bomb that hit Queensland and New South Wales in Australia.  I had always been told that loss adjusting is a ‘way of life’ rather than a job. 

The rain bomb led to a few very hectic weeks (and weekends) of co-ordination challenges, which clearly showed how true that statement is! This included collaboration with my colleagues in Australia, detailed planning & liaison with insurers’ NAT CAT response team, survey package assignments to ground adjusters, and preparation of daily reports to collate triage results back to the NAT CAT response team.

What a rush!!!

In between all that action, there were also numerous marketing activities that needed to be conducted to showcase what the Asia Pacific team, our Strategic Alliance Partners across the region and the wider global Integra team bring to the APAC region.

All in all, a frantic ten weeks in Singapore. But in that short space of time while on secondment, I got exposed to many different aspects of loss adjusting which was fantastic, especially for someone like me who is in the early years of their journey as an Engineering Adjuster.

Thank you, Integra! I’m definitely looking forward to my next secondment opportunity to learn more!