It wasn’t hard last year to find a business or factory in the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez region that didn’t suffer heavy flood damage. In fact, El Paso flood damages were estimated at more $100 million. In Juárez the estimate was $400 million.

      Most industrial firms on both sides of the border were insured, but some discovered the hard way that there can be gaps between U.S. and Mexican insurance.

      In the El Paso/Juárez area, Wells Fargo Insurance Services of Texas offers insurance to bridge the gaps between U.S. and Mexican policies.

      “Last year we had quite a bit of flooding and some of the plants in Juárez were taken out for quite a while,” says Wells Fargo’s Kirk Jelinek. “In my experience what we find is that most don’t have dovetailed U.S.-Mexican insurance plans.”

      Wells Fargo recently acquired the Rogers & Belding Insurance Agency, Inc., a single-office agency in El Paso, Texas, and its subsidiaries. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The new entity is part of Well Fargo Insurance Services of Texas.

      Jelinek says Wells Fargo Insurance Services of Texas can assist companies on either side of the border to protect their cross border activity. As with other cross border businesses, it often is best to have a combination of Mexican and U.S. companies providing professional services.

      Jelinek says there are coverage gaps that companies need to be aware of. Some of these include differences in the way business interruptions are classified and handled. Other examples concern differences in medical protection and how embezzlement is categorized.

      Some Mexican policies, for instance, protect against a loss of profits during business interruptions, but only lost profits on the Mexican side. Since many maquila-type operations are run as cost centers, there may be no profit to speak of on the Mexican side, yet a business interruption could represent hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost business on the U.S. side.

      Sometimes it takes a company close to the border to understand border business...

...Continued in the pages of Twin Plant News, Subscribe Today!