For our latest In the Driver’s Seat entry, we spoke to Peter Johansson, Principal Risk Engineer at Zurich Resilience Solutions (ZRS) — a risk management services group that has been created to address a rapidly changing risk landscape, with a holistic approach to supporting risk management and helping people build business resilience.
Peter plays a pivotal role in helping organisations manage and mitigate emerging risks. With a focus on sustainability and the transition to electric vehicles, Peter is at the forefront of developing comprehensive strategies that address new risks in sustainability and technology. His expertise is instrumental in guiding organisations through the intricacies of risk management, from procurement and operation to the end-of-life phase of assets, ensuring resilience in a rapidly evolving market.
What is your dream vehicle and why?
One that is powered by the next generation of battery tech. What I mean by this is that I’m very excited about the move to EVs for a lot of reasons.
I think as EVs continue to become mainstream, people will continue to understand they are relatively simple vehicles. Currently, there are something like 20 moving parts in an EV, while an ICEV has about 2,000.
The future of EVs and where they’re heading is great. As popularity continues to drive more supply, variety and competition in the market, this will put downward pressure on EV purchase prices over time and drive increased innovation. I’m very much looking forward to seeing the space evolve.
What is something you’re working on right now at Zurich Resilience Solutions?
In a nutshell, turning mandatory climate disclosure requirements into an Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) competitive advantage for our fleet operator clients. It’s actually a current theme that we’re presenting a whole lot more now, and this is all about the upcoming mandatory climate disclosure reporting that comes into effect from January 2025 for Group 1 entities.
If your trigger for doing all this is compliance and you’re only doing it for that reason, you’re going to miss all the other good stuff that comes with it.
So I try to get people to think about it in another way, like those nutrition information panels you see on packaged food that came out in the early 2000s, and since then what’s in food matters and the consumer buys on that basis. Well, in a similar way, this is also what’s going to happen at a company level. So while mandatory climate disclosure is the burning concern, you need to think about ESG’s bigger picture as sustainability.
What we’re trying to get clients in the fleet space to do is go back to first principles on something called eco-safe driving, which is what ESG was before the ESG they know today. We’re trying to get people to go, “I’m being told I’ve gotta do this, but if I look at it strategically, tactically and operationally I can turn this into a differentiator.”
Use the ESG reporting as a way to tell a story about where you’re heading and how you’re differentiating. Don’t just knee-jerk react. If you can differentiate your brand that way, you will become a supplier of choice.
What is something you’re most proud of at work?
Navigating traditional risk is generally straightforward. But to someone running a business, it’s also about cybersecurity, climate change, supply chains, war, famine, pestilence, and all the other emerging risks. I actually see our role as being a conduit to understanding all the new exposures happening, what controls are being developed, and what’s leading the charge globally.
The big multinationals, they’ve got the people in-house to manage this, but 95% of Australian businesses are small and medium-sized, without the resources to understand and manage this.
An example would be a manufacturer who’s got a niche in Australia, and they realise that all their eggs are in one basket in one geographical region, and we help them diversify their supply chain to help them minimise and avoid those risks.
Look at what’s happened in just the last couple of years, and also look at how cybersecurity has ramped up. If you get the basics right, you can protect yourself really well.
I really love helping our clients get the low-hanging fruit right and get them up to standard, which is something that still excites me and makes me proud.
What is the hardest part about what you do?
Staying on the focus of emerging risk, with the sheer volume of information happening out there, like how cybersecurity news changes weekly, or how climate change news changes weekly.
You’ve only got so much brain space and bandwidth, so it’s more about using your time wisely to stay up-to-date with it all, especially being the conduit for our clients, which means needing to absorb and understand a lot of information quickly. It can be tough.
Managers in the mobility space have a tough job too. What is your company doing to help make it easier for them?
Refine their strategy and risk tolerance and also reduce losses (all types including attritional and major) so that they are not distracted by spot fires and can stay on track to deliver their strategic aims.
The question “What is our risk tolerance?” is often a missing link in business conversations. Across financial safety and the various dimensions of risk, how much will we tolerate? And by that, I mean to what severity and how often? Once you have you risk matrix and your risk tolerance, then that’s your governance right there.
Smaller operators don’t normally think that way. In the mobility space, for example, it includes telling someone “You don’t know your unit cost, so how do you know where profitability is?”, which then you’d hear something like “Funny you should mention that, because I feel like I’m always chasing my tail and I’m not looking at the fact that I’m not really making money.”
So we’re giving them the headspace to step back and look at it strategically, so they’re not just chasing crashes and fuel wastage and profitable cubic metres on trucks. We’re giving them the tools to think critically and be proactive rather than reactive, so that they’re not always on fire.
Who is the most interesting person you’ve met in the mobility industry and why?
Lee Sauerwald, who is from Uniting Communities and a Founding Partner for Carbon Neutral Adelaide, has been an advocate for eco-safe driving for years. I really look up to him and he’s truly ahead of his time with what we’re seeing with ESG today. I watched his symposium on eco-safe driving and overall really like what he’s doing in the space.
What do you think is the biggest challenge currently facing the mobility industry?
It would have to be transitioning from having no business intelligence to having at least some. Most operators generally aren’t in the business intelligence space. It’s going to be the enabler for a lot of things, not just ESG, but also profitability, loss control, and all that sort of thing.
Particularly in heavy transport, a lot of people just don’t want to think about this stuff. It’s like with any new system, they’re thinking “Well I’m sure there are benefits but I’ve got to invest time to get across it, and I don’t feel like I have time for it.” and that’s where the industry sometimes struggle with the adoption.
What do you think is still missing or poorly understood in the mobility industry?
I still believe having a clearly defined organisational risk tolerance is poorly understood.
The huge thing that the big end of town does really well but the smaller end of town could do so much better but doesn’t, is to sit down and evaluate what they will tolerate and what they won’t — and that’s with humans, equipment, hygiene, financial, legal, safety, brand image. What are you prepared to tolerate?
What do you think the mobility industry will look like 10 years from now?
Let me frame my answer in the context of the cost of running a motor fleet. The biggest chunk of money on the table for a fleet manager is utilisation. Then comes the cost of function, wear and tear, crashes, brand, drivers, and turnover.
Every single one of us is paying for depreciation on vehicles that we’re using only a fraction of the time. With EV infrastructure improving and opening up over time, we’ll think more about mobility devices like trains, where you hop on and off, or more like rideshare and rental vehicles.
There will always be a need for some people or businesses to have their own vehicles. But I look at when businesses that have full fleets, they have some corporate vehicles and some pool cars that they’ve gotten for convenience, but they mostly just sit there and are used for maybe one hour a day maximum. You’d be way better off catching a taxi.
I think as fueling becomes more and more non-specialised, like when you can just plug your vehicle into an outlet, that means you won’t have all the criticality nature, such as when a vehicle fails to operate, it’s not sitting on a fuel tank and hasn’t got the hazards associated with it.
I really believe the whole thing will end up going to a model where vehicles aren’t owned by individuals or corporations, and it will be a huge cultural shift with a lot more “fit for purpose” niches.
Keen to learn more about Zurich Resilience Solutions or Peter? Reach out to him directly on LinkedIn or visit the Zurich Resilience Solutions website.
If you think you have what it takes to be interviewed for our next In the Driver’s Seat or if you have suggestions on who we should talk to, get in touch with us.
