The shield behind the shipment

Skjoldmark writes cargo insurance for goods in transit. Three cargo underwriters started the firm in Gothenburg in 2011. Today 1,200 specialists in 14 offices work to a single test: does the cover still hold when the load shifts?

Why a shield

Skjold is Swedish for shield. A shield is carried. It moves with whoever holds it, and it is judged in the one second the blow arrives. We named the company after it because that is what cargo cover is for: the moment of impact.

Cargo is rarely lost in the middle of a voyage. It is lost at the handover points: a pallet re-stacked at a cross-dock, a trailer left overnight, a return parcel opened before it is scanned in, a reefer door left ajar in a queue. We price those points, and we write the wording to cover them by name.

From Gothenburg to Seattle

The firm began with three underwriters and a shared irritation: policies nobody could read without a lawyer. Rotterdam opened in 2013, on the doorstep of Europe’s largest port. In 2016 we made Seattle our US head office, close to the Port of Seattle and the trans-Pacific lanes that run through the Northwest Seaport Alliance.

We now write cover on more than 110 trade lanes and insure about $1.8 billion of cargo value a year. The book has grown a good deal since Gothenburg, and the policy wording is still short enough to read aloud on the phone.

Where we sit

Fourteen offices, one wording

Underwriters, inspectors, surveyors and claims handlers work out of the depots and ports they cover, across North America and Northern Europe. A claim in Rotterdam is inspected by someone who can be at the terminal by lunch.

14 Offices

1200 Specialists

94% Claims settled in 30 days

Operating principles

Five rules we do not bend

These decide which risks we write, how we write them, what a claim file has to contain, and why a client stays after the first claim.

Price the risk in front of us

The one on the loss runs, at the premium it needs. When the loss history and the price do not meet, we say so in the first call.

Inspect the goods in person

Our inspectors open the carton, weigh the pallet, check the seal number and read the temperature log. A portal upload gets the file started; the inspection is what we pay on.

Keep the wording short

A clause that needs a lawyer to explain it gets rewritten. Your operations manager should be able to read the whole policy in one sitting.

Pick up at 02:00

Trailers get cut open at night. The loss notification line is staffed around the clock, every day, by people who can assign an inspector on the spot.

Pay within 30 days

Ninety-four percent of claims close within 30 days. A paid claim is a client who can restock and keep shipping.

We started with a small book of cargo in Gothenburg and one aim: a policy that still pays on the day the pallet tips. Most of what we have done since is refuse clauses that would break that.
The three founding underwriters, Skjoldmark

Talk to the underwriter who will handle your file

Tell us what you ship, where it goes, which carriers move it, and how it has been lost before. You get terms you can read in one sitting, from the person who wrote them.

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