Overhauling BC Arrangements for a Marine Liability Insurer: PRA Compliance and International Reporting
Sector: Marine Insurance | Scope: BIA, BC plan, Operating Manual, training, tabletop exercise | Outcome: Full BC overhaul delivered under budget, PRA and international reporting requirements met
Business continuity arrangements in the financial services sector are not optional. For firms regulated by the Prudential Regulation Authority, the expectation is clear: documented, tested, and maintainable BC arrangements that can withstand regulatory scrutiny. For an organisation with operations and reporting requirements spanning multiple jurisdictions — including Cyprus, Hong Kong, and others — the complexity of meeting those requirements coherently across different regulatory environments adds a further layer of challenge.
This client, a specialist marine liability insurer operating at the heart of the international shipping industry, came to Cambridge Risk Solutions in late 2024 with a specific and time-bounded brief: a complete overhaul of their business continuity arrangements.
The Starting Point
The trigger was an audit that had identified gaps in the existing BC arrangements. It is worth noting — and this is not an observation unique to this engagement — that audit reports produced by financial sector reviewers are not always reliable guides to what good BC practice actually looks like. Findings are sometimes factually imprecise, the standard being audited against is not always clearly stated, and recommendations do not always reflect current best practice. What such reports reliably do is create a clear organisational imperative to act.
Cambridge Risk Solutions was brought in to cut through the noise: to assess what was actually required, what was genuinely missing, and what needed to be built.
The Work
The engagement covered the full BC development cycle. A Business Impact Analysis established the critical processes, dependencies, and recovery priorities for the organisation — the foundation on which everything else was built. From that, a suite of BC plans was developed, along with an Operating Manual that describes the BC process in plain terms: what the arrangements are, how they work, and crucially, the steps the organisation will follow to maintain the documentation internally going forward.
That last element matters. A BC programme that requires an external consultant to function is not a BC programme — it is a dependency. The Operating Manual was designed to give the internal team genuine ownership of the maintenance cycle, with Cambridge Risk Solutions providing the framework and the expertise, and the client retaining the capability to keep it current.
BC training was delivered to key staff, and a tabletop exercise tested the plans and the team’s ability to respond under pressure. Findings from the exercise — good practice, gaps, and recommendations for ongoing development — were captured in the post-exercise report. The full engagement came in under budget.
The Outcome
The client now has a coherent, documented, and tested BC programme that meets PRA requirements and addresses the international reporting obligations across its various jurisdictions. The arrangements that arrived as a set of audit findings have been replaced with something the organisation understands, owns, and can maintain.
The marine insurance sector is not short of real-world disruption to test organisational resilience against. At the time of writing, the implications of ongoing instability in key global shipping routes continue to occupy the attention of everyone connected to the international maritime industry — a reminder, if one were needed, that for organisations at the centre of global trade, business continuity is never a purely theoretical exercise.