MOST business entities operating in Slovakia do so without sufficient insurance coverage according to Allianz-Slovenská Poisťovňa, which estimated that only 30 percent of businesses had adequate levels of insurance coverage, the SITA newswire wrote in November.
The insurer reported that the aggregate number of insurance claims caused by natural disasters increased by several times in 2010, amounting to about 50,000 claims and damages of almost €40 million. Of these, only 1,400 claims involved business insurance. Mojmír Vedej, the head of the department of corporate clients at Allianz-SP, deduced that there were much higher damages among businesses but that these policyholders did not have adequate insurance coverage.
According to Vedej, businesspeople often do not realise the potential risks they might encounter. Small entrepreneurs, made up mostly of self-employed persons, are often most unfamiliar with the potential risks. And Vedej noted that many of the self-employed are former employees who were forced by their employer to start a trade business and carry out the same activities, with the same risks as before, but now do so as a self-employed person. Vedej emphasised that it is the self-employed tradesperson who now bears responsibility and who needs to purchase an insurance policy and from this viewpoint Allianz-Slovenská Poisťovňa sees this business segment primed for growth.
Allianz-SP stated that it has also noticed fraudulent behaviour in this segment of its business and noted that it has had a success rate of about 60 percent in uncovering fraud in suspicious claims.
