Consider this hypothetical example: A crane buckles on site and the load is destroyed, a neighbouring structure is damaged and the rigging gear is a write-off. For the operator, the incident is bad enough but the worse problem often arrives next: the material damage insurer, the liability insurer and the transport insurer each open the file, look sideways at the others - then begin arguing over which policy is actually on the hook.
That standoff - not the incident itself - is the risk a new wave of specialist cover is pitching to remove. This month, ARTes Specialty launched an integrated crane and rigging policy, its third specialist product in Australia in under two years, that folds material damage of up to $15 million, business interruption, riggers’ liability and transport exposures into a single wording, with liability limits running to $20 million. The point of consolidation is not just tidier paperwork; it is to collapse the seams between policies where disputes tend to live.
ARTes CEO Chris Thomas (pictured) said the underlying problem was one his team kept encountering across specialist trades.
“What we identified was a recurring theme: businesses were often buying multiple policies from different insurers to cover what is, in reality, a single operation,” Thomas says.
The mechanics of a fragmented program are easy to underestimate until something goes wrong. A crane operator might hold equipment cover with one insurer, public and products liability with another, transit cover with a third and specialist riggers’ liability with a fourth. Each wording has its own triggers, exclusions and definitions. When a loss spans several of them at once - as serious crane incidents almost always do - the operator is left at the centre of a coverage argument they did not create and cannot resolve.
For a financially robust business, that delay is painful. For the kind of small, equipment-dependent operators that dominate these trades, it can be terminal. The financial backdrop is already unforgiving: construction accounted for roughly 27% of all corporate insolvencies in 2023-24, the largest share of any industry, according to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC). A further 2,636 building firms became insolvent in the year to March 2025, up 23% on the prior year. An operator with thin margins and tight cash flow cannot afford to have a major claim frozen for months while insurers debate apportionment behind the scenes.
The result is that a coverage gap can open up precisely at the join between policies - each insurer pointing to the next, with no single party accountable for the whole event. It is a structural weakness of the multi-policy model rather than a failure of any individual wording.
A consolidated policy attacks the problem at its source by putting one underwriter behind the entire operation. With material damage, liability, transport and operational exposures sitting under a single wording, there is no second insurer to argue with - the question of which policy responds simply does not arise, because there is only one.
That is where the value can land for the client.
“When something goes wrong, clients want solutions, not debates between insurers about which policy should respond,” Thomas said.
For brokers, the proposition works on two levels. At placement, a single specialist wording is simpler to arrange and easier to explain than a patchwork of four policies stitched across different carriers. But the more durable selling point is what happens at claim: a single point of accountability, and a claim that moves rather than stalls. Claims on the ARTes wording are managed and settled in Australia by ToPAz Claims Management, which keeps that accountability close to the client rather than offshore.
None of this removes the underlying hazard of crane and rigging work. Consolidation is not a universal fix - a single wording still has to be broad enough to actually capture the exposures it replaces. But it reframes what brokers are really selling when they place specialist cover. The test of a policy is not how it reads on the slip; it is whether, when a crane is on its side and the client is counting the cost, there is one insurer answering the phone - or four pointing at each other
