Claims research

Working with clients and their local P&I correspondents to co-ordinate effective strategies for dealing with persistent claim and delay problems in particular ports

In certain areas and ports of the world, ship operators and their  insurers are regularly exposed to what appear to be unreasonable claims and operational delays  - sometimes caused by inflexible Port or Customs authorities, but more often caused by rogue receivers (and receivers' port agents)  who exploit  weakness in the local legal systems to pursue bogus claims and extort funds.

Sometimes, certain issues such as the poor quality of local surveying resources - will stand out above anything else but often these are only symptoms of deeper systemic problems

Everybody in the industry knows where these difficulties are likely to occur but more often than not limited time and  resources means that the problems are left unattended and are reluctantly taken for granted rather than properly understood and addressed. 

Many of these problems are made worse by the fact that individual cases are often handled in accordance with the different styles and experience of individual case handlers and in accordance with the ever changing time and commercial pressures of the moment. This lack of consistency undermines any long term strategy by the P&I correspondent. And even if one assumes that  the P&I correspondent has a strategy (which many do), it is not always straightforward to double-check that it is a strategy that actually matches the requirements of all of his clients.

AMS, with its roots in the P&I industry, ship agency and ship broking, is well placed to understand and investigate these problems from different perspectives - the perspectives of the  insurers (at both case handler and strategic levels), of ship operators, of P&I correspondent, of ship agents and local and State authorities.

With focus and understanding comes the possibility to make recommendations

In AMS' experience, many of the recurrent problems can be resolved by attention to deficits of trust wherever they exist and  by relatively small changes to claims handling procedure and terms of the customary carriage contracts.

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