Philip Deramo - Why You Need a Business Plan

Whether you are trying to start a new business or looking to expand an existing one, it is essential for your success to create a business plan. As Vice President at Berkley Re America, Philip Deramo knows the importance of having a business plan to achieve success as a business owner.

For the last twenty years, he has been creating business plans for his clients. Without a plan a business is largely rudderless creating haphazard and reactive day-to-day activities. Here are some top reasons why a business needs to have a business plan in place.

1.A business plan is a map to the future. It will help you to better understand your business and help you to set goals and chart a course of action to achieve those goals.

2.It will help you secure funding in order support growth. During the course of business, you will be provided with opportunities to grow your business.

3.You will need a business plan to assess opportunities and come up with a course of action to take advantage of them. 

4.A plan will help you to manage cash flow, an essential requirement for all businesses.

5.It provides the necessary information to support a strategic exit. At some point in time, you will decide it is time to leave the business.

Having clear business goals and the path needed to reach those goals is important for any business to succeed. Creating a business plan can help you stay in business and find success. As an insurance underwriting professional, Philip Deramo has been creating business plans for companies for twenty years.

Philip Deramo - Cyber Liability Insurance and Why You Need It

Philip Deramo has been working as an insurance underwriter for the last twenty years. In the last ten years, he has been building his experience with cyber liability insurance. But, what is cyber liability insurance coverage?

While most security professionals are required to attend a risk training session during their careers, many of them are unaware of cyber liability insurance. For countries like the United States, which have mandatory breach notification laws, this type of insurance has been most successful when used as a risk transfer option.

As data breaches become more common, the option of adding cyber liability coverage is increasingly attractive. The expenses associated with dealing with a breach, including the cost of compiling with the mandatory notification laws, can be extremely high, making adding this type of policy to a business’s existing insurance coverage is vital.

Cyber liability insurance covers a large range of situations, including:

• Data breach and privacy crisis management.
• Multimedia and Media liability coverage.
• Extortion liability coverage.
• Network security liability.

Some of the items covered under this insurance may overlap or be connected to other policies. Even if there is an overlap with policies, having a cyber liability policy in place will ensure that all of the associated cyber risks are covered. When looking for the right policy, it is important to obtain the right broker. Philip Deramo has spent the last ten years increasing his knowledge of cyber liability insurance coverage.

Philip Deramo - The Importance of Reinsurance

Reinsurance, a product line Philip Deramo has extensive experience in underwriting, happens when multiple insurance companies purchase insurance policies from other insurers in order to share the risk. An extension of the concept of insurance, it passes a part of the risk from the original insurer to others. There are four main reasons why reinsurance is an important part of the industry.

1. Reinsurance works to protect insurers from large claims. In order to spread out the risk of paying out a large claim, insurers take part of the original claim they agreed to insure and reinsure part of it with others. These reduce the risk that any one insurer will incur a substantial loss.
2. Peaks and troughs in the insurance industry throw off the balanced set of underwriting results insurers are looking for each year. With reinsurance, there is a cap on the amount of claims an insurer has to pay out during any given year.
3. When a country is vulnerable to natural disasters, it is important to spread the risk. Reinsurance may be used to help spread the risk outside the country.
4. If an insurer wants to insure a very large risk, but is unable to on its own, reinsurance can allow them to accept the whole risk and then reinsure any part that they cannot keep.

Reinsurance can help mitigate the risk any one insurer is subjected to. This can help an insurance company with too much liability lighten their load. Philip Deramo is a results-driven insurance underwriting professional with extensive knowledge and experience with reinsurance.

Philip Deramo - Experienced Insurance Underwriter

Philip Deramo set himself up for success in the insurance industry by studying law at Quinnipiac University School of Law in 1987. He then worked as an Assistant State Prosecutor for Connecticut and entered the insurance industry as in-house counsel for Kemper Insurance after a few years cutting his teeth in criminal courts. Kemper Insurance is a family of companies with scattered over the United States. Kemper has over 30,000 representatives offering customers the best auto, home, and life insurance policies possible to help them prepare for the future. After working as in-house counsel for several years with Kemper, Deramo became an underwriter, a position that he has maintained for much of his career in insurance.

Philip Deramo has performed many different duties as an insurance underwriter throughout his career. He has researched prospective clients on behalf of his employers to decide if the company can offer these customers certain insurance policies and figure out which products will fit with their needs the best. Philip Deramo has learned early on that he had to be very attentive to detail and analytical so that he can give his clients the best policies for their individual situations. Underwriters often rely on their experience and their instinct in many cases, as well as their understanding of the policies their company offers. Deramo has developed excellent instincts and abilities throughout his career.

Philip Deramo gained experience as a mentee of experienced underwriters on his way to leadership positions within the insurance industry. He trained hard to gain the knowledge he needed to get started, but he has also taken advantage of the help that others offered him.

Philip Deramo - Quinnipiac University Law School Moot Court Judge

Philip Deramo earned his law degree from Quinnipiac University Law School in 1987. He had many responsibilities as a law student there, including volunteering as a judge in the law school’s moot court. He heard cases and made rulings in this optional club for law students to practice their skills in front of their peers. Despite all of the extra work Deramo did as a moot court judge, he loved being a part of the moot court and the experience helped him hone his skills and talents in the courtroom, skills that he would later use to great effect in his career as an attorney and then insurance underwriter.

Moot courts are simulated court rooms set up by law students to test their skills in the courtroom. They help students apply the concepts and knowledge they developed in the classroom in scenarios very close to real life. Philip Deramo started in the moot court at Quinnipiac University Law School as a litigator and eventually by the strength of his commitment to the moot court and its core purpose, which is to provide law students with the practice they’ll need to improve their skills and help people after they graduate, that he became moot court judge, testing his fellow students in their litigation ability.

Philip Deramo gained valuable experience as a litigator and a judge in moot court. He went on to work for the Division of Criminal Justice in Connecticut and has worked as an insurance underwriter for several insurance companies, including WR Berkley.

Philip Deramo - Three Skills All Insurance Underwriters Need to Succeed

Philip Deramo has worked as an insurance underwriter for many years for several different companies. Most recently, he worked for WR Berkley Re America, an insurance company that began as a small startup with only four employees and is now a national insurance company player. Deramo highlights three skills that he had to develop to be successful as an insurance underwriter:

Analytics. Underwriters have to be able to pull out pertinent information from clients’ files to determine what kind of insurance products their companies can offer them. Philip Deramo started developing these skills in his early days of law school at Quinnipiac University School of Law.

Decision-making. Underwriters often have to make difficult decisions sometimes based on incomplete information. Philip Deramo had to make time-sensitive calls based on the data in front of him and what he feels is right. This is not an easy thing to do on a daily basis, but if you can start to analyze the decisions you make in your day-to-day life, you can start to make better decisions in your work.

Attention to detail. Minute details in customer files can make all the difference in the insurance coverage they receive. You owe it to the customers and your company to retain small bits of information so that you can analyze it and make decisions based on it.

Philip Deramo worked hard to develop these skills so that he could perform his duties as best he could. He worked as the Vice President of WR Berkley Re America until 2015.