What is Business Insurance?
If you look at the business climate in the UK, you’ll see that it’s dominated by small and medium-sized entities. More specifically, SMEs account for an incredible 99.9% of all private sector firms, whilst they also account for more than half the turnover generated in this space.
If you own one of these SMEs, the chances are that you’ll have one or more forms of insurance to help safeguard your interests. Some of these insurance products also represent legal requirements, depending on the nature of your venture and how you interact with clients and customers.
In this post, we’ll appraise the importance of business insurance whilst asking what type of protection your need.
What is Business Insurance and Why Should You Care?
As we’ve already said, business insurance is a broad church that includes a wide range of financial products, which are designed to protect various aspects of your venture and key interactions with customers.
This description also offers you an insight into why you need various types of insurance, as these products create a viable and affordable way of protecting your business’s most valuable assets.
Certain products have also been designed to safeguard businesses in instances where employees, customers or clients are injured on commercial premises. This is a key consideration, whilst it also a potentially costly legal issue that you can help to negate with proactive insurance policies.
What are the Different Types of Insurance?
The latter type of insurance is referred to as public liability insurance, which protects you in various scenarios where a customer tries to pursue legal action against your business.
This product is also one of several aimed at safeguarding the interactions between businesses and their clients, with professional indemnity policies offering similar coverage.
This provides specific protection for service-centric companies such as solicitors or accountants, who provide professional advice to clients across an array of different issues. This type of advice is trusted, but in some instances it may be misplaced and cause clients to lose money or suffer adversely as a direct result.
In this instance, professional indemnity insurance provides much-needed safeguards for businesses and help to cover costs should compensation be awarded to clients.
Ultimately, you need to determine which types of insurance are suitable for you and capable of providing value for money, and can liaise with industry experts to help achieve this objective.
The Last Word
As we’ve already said, there may be some instances where certain types of insurance represent a legal requirement, although only employers’ liability cover is currently mandated across all industries by law in the UK.
You have a responsibility as a business-owner to ensure that you meet all of your legal requirements in this respect, and to accomplish you should partner with an experienced insurance lawyer like Browne Jacobson.
Beyond this, solicitors and accountants are amongst those who are legally required to have professional indemnity insurance, but once again you’ll need to determine your precise legal requirements before purchasing products.
