Saskia Van Oostveen

Construction and motor trade are the two areas Saskia knows best, and both carry liability exposures that are specific enough to catch people out.

She has seen clients assume that cover bought directly automatically includes exposures that may in fact be restricted or excluded. Two she watches closely are faulty workmanship in construction, and whether a motor trade business is properly covered when it test-drives a customer’s vehicle.

Her approach is to understand what the business actually does first, then check whether the insurance matches those activities rather than trusting the name on the policy.

Saskia also works with commercial property owners, assessing the risk for new clients and re-assessing it at renewal rather than rolling the previous year forward unchanged.

The questions she asks are practical ones: how the property is used, what has changed since the last review, and whether the wording carries a limitation the owner should understand before a claim rather than during one.

A recurring problem Saskia sees is a client reading a broad description like liability insurance and assuming every related activity is covered.

In practice, exclusions, definitions and conditions can make two policies that look alike behave very differently. That is why she spends the time on what the client actually does and checks the policy against the real exposure. The point is not to arrange a policy. It is for the client to know where the cover applies and which assumptions need testing.