Role Summary
As a Senior Business Development Manager, you will collaborate as part of a team to generate deal flow for Hillridge’s expanding range of Weather Index insurance products. The BDM should be capable of consultative, value-selling over long negotiation cycles. The primary focus for BD activities will be in the Mekong Delta, where Hillridge has been awarded funding from the Australian government under the Business Partnerships Platform (BPP) to develop insurance products for climate resilience in the region.
Key responsibilities include:
· Industry analysis: Vietnam Agriculture and insurance industry composition and structure, as well as analysis of the role of national and provincial governments in the regulation and promotion of insurance products. This role is especially focussed (but not limited to) opportunities in the Mekong Delta.
· Customer origination and analysis:
o Utilising your network and/or cold-calling target companies to build relationships with a view to securing meetings for the APAC Business Development Director.
o Engaging with farmer networks such as co-operatives and member associations to educate about parametric insurance and mitigation of financial risk via the Hillridge platform.
o Customer profile information and contact lists for entry into the Hillridge CRM system.
o Customer journey, with current pain points in dealing with financial services institutions
o Assessment of propensity for technology, and to pay for insurance
· Competitor intelligence: Assessment of current agricultural insurance options (established and start-up) in Vietnam.
· Marketing plan for Hillridge Technology, especially in the development of digital marketing campaigns that are likely to appeal to Vietnamese customers, as well as coordinating in-person information sessions and workshops.
Who You Will Be Working With
You will report to the APAC Director of Business Development, James Symons. James has worked in a variety of Agribusiness and Agtech roles across Asia for 14 years and is based in HCMC. You will also work collaboratively with our insurance partners MSIG and BMI, who will ultimately responsible for issuing any insurance policies.
About Hillridge Technology (Clickable Impact 's client)
Hillridge Technology Pty Ltd is a startup aiming to revolutionize the insurance industry for agriculture in Vietnam, which is currently critically under-served and inefficient. Hillridge is an Australian-based insurance technology provider that develops and deploys tools to address the climate protection gap. In 2021, Hillridge launched a platform to help farmers buy affordable weather index insurance in Australia with Marsh, the world’s largest insurance brokers, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance and Nutrien Ag Solutions. This insurance protects farmers against risks that local insurers won't cover, such as drought, frost, heat and too much rain. This parametric insurance pays based on extreme weather at critical times for crops such as drought during germination, heat stress over summer, frost during flowering, and heavy rainfall at harvest. Having successfully developed and introduced products in Australia, Hillridge has also launched parametric insurance products for Vietnam with our local insurance partners, MSIG and Bao Minh (BMI).
Developing countries like Vietnam suffer disproportionately from extreme climate events, since less than 4% of the climate damages incurred in developing countries is insured. Traditional insurance models are simply too expensive to be affordable in many places, and while disaster insurance for sovereign governments and microinsurance for the poor are emerging financial products, there remain barriers to widespread adoption. An ADB report from 2020 identifies the specific climate risks faced by Vietnam, which has extremely high exposure to flooding including, riverine, flash, and coastal flooding. Vietnam also has high exposure to Typhoons/tropical cyclones and their associated hazards, while areas of the country are prone to drought and its effects especially on seasonal crops such as rice.
Parametric insurance is a form of cover that does not indemnify losses after the fact (that is, pay based on the damage suffered), but an alternative where insurers agree to make a payment based on pre-determined metrics such as the severity of a triggering event. For example, this might mean setting a threshold of high or low rainfall within a particular period of a given crop cycle, or the strength of a typhoon which makes landfall close to an asset like an Acacia plantation. One of the key features of parametric insurance is prompt claims payments, as it does not require a damage assessment. It lowers costs by automating the insurance workflow. It increases transparency and certainty of payouts to the insured for given weather events with transparent, immutable distributed ledgers. And it provides transparency and certainty to insurers, reducing claims fraud and increasing trust. This feature will be extremely important in Vietnam, where trust in financial and insurance products among farmers is a major barrier to adoption.
We are seeking a talented Business Development Manager for Vietnam to join our team in order to originate and drive key partnerships with insurers, Agricultural producers and stakeholders along Agri-value chains, such as fertiliser and seed companies, or high-volume buyers of agricultural commodities.
