When you think about the complexity of managing insurance for a major corporation, consider this: FMC Corporation's property insurance program alone once involved more than 40 different insurance companies. Multiply that across all lines of coverage—from workers' compensation and cyber liability to specialized policies for international operations—and you begin to understand the magnitude of the challenge facing corporate risk managers today.
Christian Heinisch, Global Director of Risk Management & Insurance at FMC Corporation, knows this challenge intimately. As the steward of FMC's global insurance portfolio, Christian oversees hundreds of insurance policies that protect the agricultural sciences giant's operations across multiple countries and business units. It's a responsibility that, until recently, required an enormous amount of manual coordination, broker dependency, and time-intensive detective work just to answer basic questions about coverage.
"All of us have way too many insurance policies that our companies are purchasing, and much of it is often on autopilot," Christian explains. "I get the basic details of a smaller renewal, let’s say the auto insurance policy in Pakistan. The brokers do a good job providing terms and sharing those with me. Then a selection is made, and renewal guidance is given, followed by the policy and other renewal documents being sent out. There isn’t much, if any, time to conduct a deeper analysis of the programs, the policy wording or the coverage details.”
This scenario—multiplied across dozens of coverage lines and international markets—illustrates the fundamental challenge that corporate risk managers face: maintaining visibility and control over increasingly complex insurance portfolios while operating with limited resources and growing regulatory demands.
Before implementing LineSlip in 2023, FMC's insurance management process reflected the industry standard—and its inherent inefficiencies. Like most large corporations, FMC worked with multiple brokers across different regions and coverage types. Each broker had their own systems, delivery methods, and reporting formats – all manual and mostly via Excel.
"The transmission of the policies from the carrier to me, as an example, either comes from some random person I've probably never dealt with or from some automated delivery system, and might go into my spam folder," Christian recalls. "The system generated email might get filtered out somewhere, or it just scrolls off my screen because I don't recognize who it's from. So, it doesn't get as much attention as it should. And then maybe that policy is never delivered and never really gets properly recorded and stored.”
This fragmented approach created several critical problems:
Broker Dependency for Administrative Support: Any analysis of policy terms or coverage comparisons required either manually reaching out to brokers and waiting days or weeks for responses or spending significant time reading through policy coverage details and doing the analysis myself. Either approach works, but it just takes time, both mine and also our brokers and other vendors.” Christian explains.
Lost Institutional Knowledge: With policies scattered across different systems and individuals, FMC's insurance history was essentially trapped in the institutional memory of brokers and previous risk managers or in some Iron Mountain storage archive. Accessing historical information required extensive detective work.
Administrative Burden: Simple tasks like preparing board reports or answering executive questions about insurance costs or responding to discovery requests on litigation sometimes required hours of data compilation from multiple sources.
When evaluating solutions for FMC's insurance management challenges, Christian was clear about what wouldn't work. Many RMIS (Risk Management Information System) platforms focus heavily on claims management, TPA data feeds, or exposure capture—but miss the fundamental building block of insurance management: the policies themselves.
"LineSlip is in a sweet spot of focusing on the policies, and no one else focuses on the policies," Christian stated. "All the RMIS companies focus on the data. They focus on the claims; they focus on other tactical data. No one else is focusing on the policies per se."
This policy-centric approach was exactly what FMC needed. Rather than trying to retrofit their insurance management around claims data or broker workflows, LineSlip provided a foundation built around the actual insurance contracts that define coverage, terms, and carrier relationships.
The implementation process was designed to be minimally disruptive to FMC's existing broker relationships while maximizing the value extracted from their insurance documentation. Brokers continue to place coverage and provide their traditional services, but now all policies flow into LineSlip's centralized repository where they're automatically indexed, analyzed, and made instantly accessible.
With LineSlip implemented, FMC's insurance management capabilities have been fundamentally transformed. The platform provides several key functionalities that address their most pressing challenges:
Centralized Policy Repository: All insurance policies from multiple brokers and carriers are automatically uploaded and stored in one centralized location. This eliminates the need to chase down policies through various broker portals or worry about documents getting lost in email systems.
Advanced Reporting & Analytics: Christian can now access comprehensive dashboards showing spend details, premium by carrier, counterparty risk exposure, and schedule of insurance through intuitive views that can be easily shared with stakeholders.
Historical Trend Analysis: One of the most valuable capabilities is the ability to analyze historical insurance data. "If I want a policy from 1984 and I want to see what the tower looked like, I can figure that out," Christian notes. "You're seeing 30-40 years’ worth of carrier relationships, and you can quickly piece the puzzle together to see what's really there."
Instant Access and Search: Perhaps most importantly, the platform provides immediate access to any policy document, regardless of year or coverage type. This eliminates the delay and dependency that previously characterized FMC's insurance management process.
The transformation in FMC's insurance management capabilities has produced measurable results across multiple dimensions:
Reduced Dependency on Brokers: Christian can now independently analyze policy coverage and terms without waiting days or weeks for broker responses. This has accelerated decision-making and reduced the administrative burden on both FMC and their broker partners. It also allows the brokers to focus on their core competency, which is placing and negotiating the coverages, rather than doing semi-admin related tasks such as document retrieval.
Improved Carrier Relationship Management: With clear visibility into historical relationships with major carriers over 30-year periods, FMC can make more informed decisions about carrier concentration, pricing negotiations, and strategic partnerships.
Streamlined Stakeholder Reporting: Preparing reports for executives, board members, or regulatory agencies has been transformed from a week-long data compilation exercise to a few clicks in the dashboard.
Better Strategic Planning: Access to comprehensive historical data enables FMC to identify trends, evaluate the effectiveness of risk transfer strategies, and make more informed decisions about insurance program structure.
What makes FMC's transformation particularly noteworthy is how it demonstrates the strategic value of treating insurance policies as valuable data assets rather than static documents. By centralizing and analyzing this information, organizations can extract insights that go far beyond traditional insurance administration.
"The large companies that have complex insurance programs and meet with multiple brokers and carriers throughout the year are going to find enormous value in this," Christian observes. "It even deals with the little stuff. All of us have smaller policies in a variety of counties. Everything gets scooped into LineSlip."
This comprehensive approach enables risk managers to see patterns and relationships that would be impossible to identify through traditional methods. For example, FMC can now quickly identify which subsidiaries of a carrier they've done business with around the world over multiple decades or assess their historical concentration risk with specific carrier groups.
The platform also addresses the practical realities of modern insurance management, where coverage is often purchased through multiple brokers and managed by lean internal teams. "If you're a mid-size company in a smaller metropolitan area, maybe your broker isn't the world's best property team," Christian notes. "And maybe they aren't doing all this work and maybe you aren't paying them the fee to do this kind of stuff. Now, as long as you have the policies, they go into LineSlip, and it can do the work for you."
FMC's experience with LineSlip reflects a broader transformation occurring in risk management. As insurance programs become more complex and regulatory requirements more demanding, organizations need technology solutions that can keep pace with these evolving challenges.
The policy-centric approach pioneered by LineSlip addresses a fundamental gap in the insurance technology landscape. While many platforms focus on claims management, broker interfaces, or financial reporting, few have tackled the core challenge of extracting maximum value from the insurance policies themselves.
"I see this as a true sweet spot for LineSlip—policy management and policy analysis," Christian explains. "We all have way too many insurance policies that our companies are purchasing, and most of it is on autopilot. This puts it all at people's fingertips. It’s nice to know there’s basically a button I can press that tells me, 'What do we have? Who is our auto insurance with around the world?' And bang, there it is."
For risk managers facing similar challenges, FMC's experience demonstrates that the right technology can transform insurance management from a reactive, administrative function into a strategic capability that provides real business value.
The platform continues to evolve, with new features like enhanced policy comparison capabilities and expanded analytics functionality. But the fundamental value proposition remains clear: by treating insurance policies as valuable data assets and providing the tools to analyze them effectively, organizations can make better risk financing decisions, reduce costs, and improve their overall risk management capabilities.
FMC Corporation's journey from fragmented policy management to comprehensive insurance visibility illustrates the transformative potential of purpose-built technology solutions. By implementing LineSlip's policy-centric platform, they've not only solved immediate operational challenges but positioned themselves to extract strategic value from their insurance investments. The results speak for themselves: faster decision-making, reduced broker dependency, improved coverage analysis, and enhanced strategic planning capabilities.
As Christian Heinisch puts it: "This system is fabulous for what it does. It puts it all at people's fingertips, and the quicker the data can be put at people's fingertips, the easier it's going to be."