Professional indemnity insurance
Covers financial loss caused by professional mistakes — for advisory professions and licensed activities.
Why this matters
Public liability insurance pays when something is damaged or someone is injured. It does not pay when your mistake simply costs money — and in advisory professions that is the normal case. The fiduciary who misses a deadline and lands the client with a back-tax bill; the architect whose calculation triggers an expensive rectification; the IT firm whose error shuts down a client's operations for days. Claims like these are called "pure financial loss", and public liability policies exclude them explicitly. That is what professional indemnity insurance is for.
In Switzerland it is compulsory for some professions — lawyers, statutory auditors, doctors, and insurance intermediaries such as ourselves. For everyone else it is voluntary, but clients ask for it more and more often before a contract is signed at all. Two things decide what a policy is worth: retroactive cover — are mistakes covered that you made before the policy began but that only come to light now? — and run-off cover: anyone who stops trading or sells up remains liable years later for past work.
What you get out of it
A mistake in your advice costs your clients money — not you.
Covers pure financial loss that no public liability policy will pay.
Compulsory for many professions, and often the condition for winning work.
What we take care of for you
- Checking whether your activity is subject to compulsory insurance
- Comparing providers on limit of indemnity, excess and retroactive cover
- Including run-off cover when you stop trading or sell the business
- Support throughout the claim, including defence against unjustified demands
The advice is free for you — we are remunerated by the insurance companies through brokerage commissions and will disclose these on request.
Tips from our consultations
What we tell our clients time and again – free of charge, even before the first meeting.
A mistake in advice is rarely noticed straight away — often only at the next tax audit, or years later when the building is completed. Without retroactive cover, the policy pays only for what happened after it began. When you change insurer, this is the single most important question.
If you give up or sell the business, you remain liable for the work you did before. Without agreed run-off cover, protection ends with the policy — and the claim arrives long after the last premium was paid. Five years is a common and sensible figure.
Not against turnover, but against what your most expensive mistake could set off. A single project can exceed the annual accounts many times over — and that is exactly where the loss arises, not in the average.
What is insured is what the policy says. Anyone who extends their advisory work into a new field — a fiduciary adding payroll accounting, an IT firm adding security audits — has to report it. Otherwise the activity is not in the policy when a claim arises, even though the premium was paid faithfully.
