Carly Chynoweth runs her eye over an insurance role carrying a whiff of danger

Colonel Gadaffi had been dead for less than a week when Richard Halstead and his boss, Stephen Ashwell, began to talk about which of them would be getting on a flight to Libya.

“We imagine that there will be construction projects that need to be insured, that there will be rebuilding: wherever there is oil there is investment,” says Ashwell, the head of global response at Hiscox, the insurance company. “So Richard and I were chatting about who should go to Libya. Probably we both will.”

Halstead, 26, an underwriter in the company’s war, violence and political terrorism team, says that travel is a big part of the job. Recent trips have included Egypt, Senegal, Bahrain and Iraq, where he visited an energy production facility that Hiscox insures.

“It was eye-opening,” the war studies graduate says. “We were in the north, which is typically a bit calmer, and we were under protection . . . I found myself standing there with the client at 10pm watching as they flared gas off, thinking, ‘I’m at work’. It was incredibly interesting.”

Halstead’s job is to insure businesses — anything from buildings and factories to mining exploration projects — against damage or interruption as a result of political violence. “That is a spectrum running from strikes, riots and civil commotion to terrorism, insurrection, revolution, mutiny, coup d’état, war and civil war. Just as you insure your car against theft or being burnt out, we insure clients’ assets against being destroyed from some sort of attack.”

When he is in London Halstead spends part of each day in the Hiscox “box”, which is one of the many clusters of six or so desks on the trading floor of Lloyd’s, the marketplace where he and his colleagues, including graduate trainee Lucy Straker, work with brokers to arrange cover for their clients.

“One of the exciting things about Lloyd’s is that it relies heavily on face-to-face trading, so there is a strong requirement for good interpersonal skills,” Straker says.

They spend a lot of time staying on top of current affairs because any change in the political spectrum could have implications for their portfolio of clients. They also rely on analyses by regional experts at Control Risks, a specialist security consultancy.

But there is no substitute for getting out on the ground and seeing things for yourself, Halstead says. “You learn as much by getting there, walking down the street and getting a sense of the place as you do by reading and research.”

For example, when Halstead visited the oil refinery in Iraq he returned with a different view of the situation. “We spent two days with them, talking about every aspect of their security and viewing the security perimeter. It makes you very much more comfortable. Obviously sometimes you can do a visit and be concerned about the security aspects. But whatever happens, you are going to come back with a better ability to underwrite the risks.” If there was a problem, Ashwell says that Hiscox, the client and the broker would work together to resolve the situation.

Visiting countries also helps to spot business opportunities, he says, because risks vary considerably between the 150 countries where Hiscox operates. “One industry might be a very safe bet in one country and very different in another.”

Ashwell calls an oil or gas pipeline a “soft risk”, meaning it is vulnerable to attack. “If you had a pipeline running through Finland, for example, there would probably be a very low risk of riots, strikes or terrorism. But if you have one that is running in Afghanistan or Iraq, or particularly Yemen at the moment, they are prone to attack by a number of different parties.” He emphasises that it is important not to make broad assumptions, as some industries can be relatively low-risk even in a high-risk country.

Ashwell first visited Colombia in the mid 1990s shortly after Pablo Escobar, the drug lord, was killed. “Today it is incredibly safe but then it was a very difficult country,” he says. “You had to change your route into work, you had to have personal security. What we found out from that visit was that certain industries were no more likely to be attacked there than in Finland . . . the classic cardboard box manufacturer was just as safe there as in Finland.

“So you could go into that country and, through travel and research, work out which risks you could insure and make money out of, and which you had to be very careful about.”

Underwriting requires confidence, drive, intelligence, an ability to get along with people and numerical literacy — although you do not have to be a mathematician, Halstead says. He had been planning to move into private security consultancy after graduating — he did an internship in this area while at university — but accidentally appl