Insurance – having cropped up repeatedly in Infra Dig podcasts of late – is the focus of this latest episode as IJGlobal continues the quest to improve understanding across the infrastructure community.

IJGlobal editorial director Angus Leslie Melville sits down with Martin Bennett – managing director of infrastructure and energy as well as private equity and M&A at Marsh – to discuss the role played by insurance in the financing of infrastructure. 

This latest episode runs for a little more than 26 minutes and focuses purely on the role played by insurance in the delivery of greenfield infrastructure as well as on M&A transactions.

This latest episode can be accessed on Spotify (embedded above) as well as through Apple Podcasts and on the Amazon service. It is also hosted across a slew of other platforms and is open access on all of them.

It was prompted by the masterclass series that Infra Dig has been running with Ravi Suri from KPMG where he repeatedly mentions the role played by insurance companies.

Having been prompted by continuous mentions of insurance, Martin kindly agreed to join us for a chat about the role he and his colleagues play in the infra stack and – fortunately – agreed that their involvement is increasingly crucial.

Martin (pictured right) says: “The role of insurance has been elevated when parties are considering a new or existing investment across the infrastructure sector – and there are a number of reasons for that.

“If I think about investment risk considerations and the role which insurance plays, the role that insurance plays is not dissimilar to those which will apply to an equity or debt investor.

“Those risks can be summarised into 3 key categories – country risk, considering the jurisdiction and legal system, underlying political risk through counterparties and the regulatory system and conditions; contractual risk, who are the project’s stakeholders, contractual undertakings, performance and technology risk, and also considering decommissioning and end of life; and then, really importantly, financial risk, the extent of exposure to natural hazards, to revenue and market demand, operational liabilities, and of course environmental liabilities.”

Tune into this latest episode to learn more about the role played by insurance companies in the financing of international infrastructure and energy.