Shaun Tarbuck:

Hi, welcome to the series of fireside chats with ICMIF leaders and CEOs. I am today joined by Peter Beaumont from Cornish Mutual.

Peter, maybe you can just introduce Cornish Mutual a little bit. So the listeners can understand where you’re from.

Peter Beaumont:

Sure. So Cornish Mutual is about 120 years old. We are based in the southwest of the UK as the name probably gives away. But we stick to a geographical niche that covers just four counties.

We’re a direct insurer, so we actually go out and see our members face to face; as we have done for, you know a long time. Our niche continues to be around agriculture and we’ve been tightening that up recently. We’ve sort of moved a bit from describing ourselves as a rural insurer and allowing our appetite to widen. For strategic reasons, perhaps we’ll discuss, we’ve tightened up our niche recently.

Shaun Tarbuck:

You’re doing some exciting stuff around sustainability, but it’s not kind of the normal way sustainability of insurers is looking, you’re looking more at the net zero sustainability for farmers, aren’t you? Maybe you can explain that direction of travel?

Peter Beaumont:

I’ll perhaps try and explain the journey as to how we got there.

So we did a strategic review, and I suppose in common with quite a lot of insurers, we’ve realized that we need to do – as insurance tends to commoditize over time -we needed to expand our offering. Our competitive advantages are around the direct relationships we have with our members, and that sense that might not sustain insurance alone into the future was a key driver. So like a lot of insurers the obvious stuff was the move to prevention. So we are starting working on prevention services.

The second piece of the puzzle was when we started looking at climate change actually driven by the regulator, and we started off with physical risk, and did the modelling, and came up with the numbers, and worked that through – I’m sure a lot of people have been through similar processes – and then we looked at transition risk. We basically ran through a series of scenarios and one of the things that popped out was that because we’re so tightly associated with a niche that’s so heavily impacted by climate change, their ability to be resilient to that transition risk within the farming niche, was not only key to their persistence and their ability to carry on in that industry, but of course by extension, Cornish Mutual because if that sector does not flourish in our region, then we’ve had it as well. So that’s led us to actually starting to develop services that help farmers go through that transition risk, which is a leap.

Shaun Tarbuck:

And obviously, you’re leading in that because the farmers are very busy running the farms and they don’t have a lot of time and are looking for all the new ways of doing things. But you’re looking at things like crop rotation, soil quality, yield and all of that, aren’t you?

Peter Beaumont:

Well, farming is quite an isolating job. It’s typically the principle, and maybe one other person is the average, and so it’s an incredibly demanding job already. If you think of all the regulations they’ve got, supply chain management and all those sorts of things, plus the world is changing and they’ve got a learn a whole load of new skills and the style of farming is being dictated by chemical companies and seed companies. They’ve now got to do something completely different and who’s going to help them do that?

We think that’s one of the things about being a mutual is you know, you solve problems as part of a community. Originally we were set up by farmers to solve the problem of the day and we became an insurer. I suppose we’re now trying to go back and do a bit more of that mutuality piece as well as just the insurance.

Shaun Tarbuck:

Yeah, answer that’s a brilliant way of phasing. It’s coming back full term, isn’t it? But you do a lot of great stuff around mutual values and shouting about your mutuality as well, mostly in the community you serve?

Peter Beaumont:

Yeah, I think that mutuality probably scores the highest is internally, it really is a set of values that people think they can connect with, and then that that allows them to project that outward. So we do talk about mutuality, but I think it’s that sense people get from working with a great organization, even if they don’t understand what mutuality is, they can feel it’s something special and that sort of really comes from within I think.

Shaun Tarbuck:

Yeah, and there’s certainly that example of net zero farms is another way of portraying your mutual values, isn’t it?

Peter Beaumont:

Yeah. It’s a really helpful mechanism to be able to explain to people why you’re doing something. You can immediately remove the suspicion because why would a shareholder company try and help me with something that it might take a lot of years to get rewarded with, you know, we’re not expecting to make lots of money out of the new services and we expect it’ll take some time to gain traction. But when you say, “oh we’re a mutual and we’re a member-led organization”, then people can understand why, and it opens doors for you in a way that I think if you’re proprietary, it just wouldn’t

Shaun Tarbuck:

Yeah, and if the farmers are doing well, you’re doing well.

Peter Beaumont:

Well, that’s the whole thing behind that scenario, you know, they have to persist for us. And yeah, absolutely, you know, we really are driven.

You know, everyone says it don’t they, that you’re members at the heart of everything you do. But when you’re direct, and you’re in front of them, and you’re seeing them every day – and we’re just coming up to show season for the first time in two years, so we’ll be out and about, you know, giving away free pasties, meeting the members again for the first time in two years, and telling them about all the new stuff we’re going to be doing for them. So it’s yeah really looking forward to that.

Shaun Tarbuck:

Yeah, just turning a little bit towards your engagement with ICMIF and so many of the members. I mean 27% of our members have a farming background/affinity, many of them are a similar size to you, and I know you’ve had some great conversations with a lot of members around the world in Canada and New Zealand and stuff: maybe you can explain how you use make ICMIF and how it benefits your organization?

Peter Beaumont:

Yeah. It’s amazing today 120 years, or 100 so years ago, Farmers around the world were busy setting up mutuals and they’re still around and a lot of them are in ICMIF.

It gives everyone a shot in the arm to be able to come together, particularly in the southwest, we live in a bit of a bubble from an insurance perspective, and a bubble as a mutual, and you need to come together with our community and see what other people are doing, share those ideas, get some critique of what you’re doing and some support for what you’re doing.

[At the 2022 MORO] We’ve brought a guy along with us who’s developing into a new role in reinsurance. So he’s come along and it’s a great development opportunity. We’ve got the conference in Rome and thinking whether we can bring some of our Young Leaders along to that, which I understand you’re doing a good rate for….

Shaun Tarbuck:

Absolutely. 50% Yeah.

Peter Beaumont:

I think there are lots of advantages from the material you put out, we’ve participated in lots of meetings, the Strategic Roundtables, and that’s not just me and the Board but are some of our other leaders as well, and they’ve all found that incredibly useful. It also really helped to embed our strategies that are so mutual. But to get that sense that there are other people with similar thoughts really gives them more confidence that it’s not just a few of us talking about it. It’s really helpful.

Shaun Tarbuck:

I know, and the MORO here, presumably you found the MORO useful. You’ve just had a working group on agricultural insurers as well haven’t you, on the last session…

Peter Beaumont:

Yeah it’s just the international scope of the people here, you know, there’s the insurance stuff but there’s what’s going on in other jurisdictions. The challenges that people have and, there’s so much to be learned. Some of our reinsurers are here as well, so that’s great to catch up with them and hopefully some of our future reinsurers as well – perhaps we’ve talked a few more into supporting us in the future.

Shaun Tarbuck:

That’s great “mutual supporting mutuals”, hopefully. Well, thank you very much Peter for sharing some great insights and I hope that’s been inspiring for a number of the listeners as well.

Peter Beaumont:

And you’re welcome. Thanks very much. You know, three of us come along we’ve all enjoyed it and we’ve gone back buzzing with ideas and some new contacts as well. Thanks very much.

Shaun Tarbuck:

That’s great, and we’ll see you in Rome. So thank you very much, Peter.

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