Bosses Rebuilding: AA Insurance's Chris Curtin

Businesses are continuing to steer their firms through financially tough times due to the Covid-19 Pandemic.AA Insurance CEO Chris Curtin, who has held the position for 25 years, told Heather du Plessis-Allan the pandemic has been one of the more unusual challenges in his career."First thing we had to do was try and get 750 people working from home with not too much notice."It was quite interesting because we've never had to deal with anything like this before, it was actually quite quickly that we saw customers being affected by the economic impacts - people losing their jobs, reduced incomes and things. We had to really rally around that sort of stuff."Mr Curtin said when claims related to accidents were dropping, they knew they needed to make changes... some they have never made before."We strongly felt that we needed to do some different things to help customers. The first thing we did was we set-up a $2 million hardship fund, so that we could help customers that were in genuine financial hardship."Secondly, and bear in mind we've never done this ever, we froze premium increases to reflect the alert levels that had people staying at home."When the claims plummeted, we realised that we'd actually charged too much premium for people during the period of level three and level four lockdown."We've essentially overpriced our car insurance so we said 'right, we need to give that money back."Mr Curtin said they will refund that money at the end of the current financial year, a sum they still need to work out.He added it will be a significant amount of money.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.