Would you pack and deliver your most valuable personal property to an unknown person to hold onto? Of course not. Yet that is exactly what happens each time a motion picture rental company does business with a new customer. It is incumbent on each Rental House to verify the identity of its customers by means of industry referrals and credit references. The fact that your customer is able to obtain equipment insurance should not be a substitute for the Rental Company performing their own due diligence to make sure they know who they are doing business with.
Taylor & Taylor tends to limit our sales of short term equipment insurance to people or companies renting from rental houses that we insure, or to customers referred to us by production companies with whom we do business. We see ourselves as supporting those folks who are doing business with our customers and doing projects that are of a personal nature to the artist. As such, we carefully vet the people to whom we sell short term equipment insurance. To date we have only had one experience where we sold a short term equipment policy to a person who ended up not returning the equipment to a rental house (we relaxed our underwriting in this instance because the rental house verified to us that the person was known to their company). Our record is very good because we do not make it easy to obtain the short term policy by asking for a fair amount of underwriting information, and we require that the rental house staff participate in the verification of the potential customer's identity.
If you go onto the RENTAL GUARD website you can see that there has been a frequency of “not returned to the Rental Company” claims reported over the years and it is our goal to try to help minimize these types of thefts if at all possible. Taylor & Taylor would like to wish PERG members a successful NAB and thank our customers for their business over these many years.
No comments:
Post a Comment