“Avoiding damage is how we can be most sustainable. But once damage has occurred, we rely on suppliers who see opportunities to save resources and reuse materials rather than discarding them and buying new ones, and that’s where we believe Ocab can help us.”
Sustainability at Frende
We talk to Arild Havsgard and Ørjan Davanger Torsnes from insurance company Frende in Norway about their approach to sustainability and how we can work together to avoid damage in the future.
How does Frende approach sustainability and where can you make the biggest difference?
Avoiding damage is how we can be most sustainable. But once damage has occurred, we rely on suppliers who see opportunities to save resources and reuse materials rather than discarding them and buying new ones, and that's where we believe you can help us.
Opportunities to preserve materials have improved in recent years, and we see that we can impact and develop efforts to save even more value. This will be both cost and resource efficient. The suppliers who best prevent damage, dry and sanitise without demolishing will receive more contracts from Frende.
We are also having discussions on how we can cooperate with various stakeholders to prevent damage through home inspections. In addition, we want to pitch in to reduce the transport of materials, labour and waste in our projects – and that requires good planning. This is something we can get even better at and we are exploring the possibility of carrying out more video inspections.
What requirements do you set for suppliers?
We ask them to answer questions about their sustainability efforts and climate goals. For the future, we want to collect climate data, which requires us to develop a standardised template for fairly comparing suppliers. It is becoming increasingly important for our suppliers to be ISO certified and to show that they have an active sustainability programme.
What parameters do you consider when procuring and selecting suppliers?
Sustainability is an important component. This may mean terminating partnerships with suppliers who do not have an active sustainability programme. We are also working on reducing the number of suppliers to ensure high quality. For us, the most important thing is to avoid damage by getting help with property inspections in order to see which interventions could prevent damage. And when damage occurs, the best supplier at salvaging value and drying without demolition will get the most contracts.
What is Frende’s social sustainability focus?
Social sustainability is important to us and when it comes to gender equality, we are almost 50/50 men and women. To ensure social sustainability in our value chain, we ask our suppliers questions based on the Norwegian Transparency Act, which aims to protect, strengthen and improve human rights.
We view this as an important tool for determining which suppliers we can work with. It is important for us to be a good employer and partner, and we are open to dialogue with our suppliers in order to improve our supplier agreements.
How would you like to work more with damage prevention?
We are in a process to see what you can do to prevent damage to Frende through property inspections. This would be an offer to give our customers the status of what damage can be prevented with the proper measures. It could potentially mean a lower premium for the customer, if they carry out the recommended measures.
We believe this could be positive for our customers and reduce incidents of damage. There is currently a close dialogue between insurance companies and damage prevention companies on how we can become more sustainable as an industry, and we are open to working more with partners who want to improve the industry.
Focus areas
