Risk Mitigation
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Royston Colburn is the head of Risk Solutions for Canpro Global, a risk mitigation company that is involved in human resources screening, security consulting and investigations. Prior to moving to Canada and joining Canpro, Royston spent 30 years as a police offier with the prestigious Scotland Yard. We sat down with Royston and asked him if the work he currently does is much different than being a police officer.
Royston Colburn: It’s actually very different because in policing you’re usually mopping up after it’s happened, although I’d have to say British policing is different than Canadian policing, it’s a different style. And there’s much more investment in preventative policing in the U.K. then there is in Canada. The consequence of that is, in Canada, unless , and this is in no way a criticism, it’s just different, a crime’s actually been committed, police don’t see themselves getting engaged in that.
What is significantly different for me is the fact that there are significant opportunities to engage in preventative activity, not only with insurance companies, but with all of our clients. To prevent crime is much cheaper in every respect; from a human perspective, from a financial perspective, then the opposite of clearing up afterwards. I totally advocate prevention mitigation, and that’s where private sector have the most to contribute to industry and commerce in Canada. Without the private sector, that would be a gap.
The reality is that technology has brought people with frauds and scams, instead of walking into your office with a scam or fraud, they can now sit at the other end of the world in an internet cafe and carry out those things. Whether that’s the management of piracy or whether it’s actually a fraud scam . . . the difficulty around that is you can’t investigate and deal with that. Very rarely can we actually get to the heart of piracy or fraud/scam that’s being conducted from an internet cafe somewhere in Africa or somewhere in the middle East, or somewhere in Asia, which are the common places.
Insurance is about covering it when it’s actually gone wrong. We’re the stage before that. We’re actually looking at measures to not prevent the need for insurance because you need that, but to increase the opportunities for clients to negotiate cheaper insurance because they’ve taken all these mitigating measures. As a client, we can help you reduce your premiums by demonstrating to the insurance company that you are doing all these things to reduce the possibility of a claim. One of the important things is that a claims-free company is an advantage not only to the client but also to the broker, and also to the insurance company. Everybody actually benefits from being claims-free. Therefore, anything we can do to assist a client in reducing their premiums and reducing the risk of a claim, everybody: insurance companies, brokers, clients, everybody is happy with that. That’s where we see opportunities.
