“Losses resulting from delays in transit are on the rise across the world. But," Kingsly Kwalar, founder of OPTIMIZ, points out (right), "it is a mistake to think that there is always no responsibility on the part of the shipping lines."
Kingsly has just been meeting with South African exporters were telling him of their frustration at the port strike (which has since been resolved).
“Some of them are seeing increased costs associated with their shipments as they have to reroute their containers to either Namibia or Mozambique in the hope to reach Rotterdam on time. Fruit underwriters complained of a significant skills shortage in the market especially in relation to surveyors,” he recounts.
“All hope seems to be lost when it comes to delay claims as it is common for shipping lines to reject such claims.”
The company Kingsly founded, OPTIMIZ, believes it doesn’t have to be like that if an exporter has all of the required evidence in place in case of a claim. Also, he points out, a significant amount of damage results from human error.
Making it easy to attribute blame for damage to landed fruit
In 2020, OPTIMIZ was launched to enable international traders to remotely inspect their containerised cargo and automate their claims processes.
To help exporters easily decide whether or not to pursue a claim resulting from delay, OPTIMIZ developed the Delay Claims Quadrant, a simple formula for stakeholders to consider whether or not there is a good case against the carrier.
Photo: OPTIMIZ
“A survey report on the quality and cause of damage of landed fruit from a surveyor in Europe costs about 1,000 to 1,500 euros. With our system such an inspection costs only 10 euros,” he says. "This is possible because rather than investigating backwards to determine cause of loss, we enable stakeholders to capture relevant and objective data on the state of the cargo along the supply chain, making it extremely easy for blame to be attributed."
Remote inspections before and after shipment
At their recent breakfast meeting in Johannesburg on the theme ‘Underwriting Perishables in a Volatile Market’ (put together by Lebogang Rahlao, general manager of the insurance broker Nacora in partnership with Kuehne and Nagel, OPTIMIZ and StilFresh) they introduced insurance brokers and underwriters to their mobile application and launched the OPTIMIZ Desktop Survey.
This innovative solution enables fruit exporters and their insurers to remotely inspect the handling, quality and condition of their produce at pre- and post-shipment, streamlining their internal evidence-gathering process from harvest to containerisation. The evidence includes photos, videos and short text together with the meta data to authenticate the collected information. Where necessary, the opinion or conclusion of a qualified surveyor can then be added on to the report.
“You provide the container number and our application conducts a search on the shipping line’s system to pull up the container history,” he explains. In this way a container’s immediate whereabouts is visible to the exporter or producer without having to source it elsewhere.
Insurers are able to obtain more and better information about their risk exposures while the application appeals to surveyors because it enables them to take on more work outside their normal geographical area while saving travel cost and admin work related to report writing.
Kingsly joined the shipping industry working for a Greek shipowner in London. Later he was headhunted to Argentina where he, as he puts it, “switched sides” helping Latin American fruit exporters and insurers with their claims and risk management.
Four years later he moved to South Africa and started StilFresh after witnessing a gap in the market for African claims experts to take part in solving the problems of African exporters.
For more information:
Kingsly Kwalar
OPTIMIZ
Tel: +44 49 160 343 9696
Email: king@optimiz.claims
www.optimiz.claims