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Official Press Release (Liz Latter), 23 February 2024
That most traditional of British businesses, the insurance Industry, is at last set to join the dotcom revolution.

Whilst the majority of insurance eCommerce initiatives have focused on personal insurances and mainly in the B2C sector, the area that shows the most potential for cost saving is in the B2B market and in particular provincial broker to insurer. The business placed through provincial intermediaries is generally profitable to insurers and the same client often stays with his broker year on year, father to son. But, to the large insurer this business is expensive to administer efficiently. Unbelievably, it is estimated that 90% of this business is still handled by phone, fax and paper.

This 5,000 strong network of brokers, who do not have large IT budgets on which to develop their own eCommerce initiatives, place over £3 billion of commercial insurance business in the UK each year.

Next month (March) will see the launch of a new eCommerce service for just this segment of the market. CoverMaker.net will open its doors - or rather its domain - to brokers and insurers transacting commercial business in the UK. The service offers a secure trading environment, which allows brokers to provide high quality submissions to insurers more cost-effectively via the Internet.

Liz Latter, MD of Redbox Systems, the company that developed the system said: "The internet provides the ideal vehicle for delivering cost savings to the commercial insurance market. We wanted to create a solution that delivered these cost savings through streamlining the current process yet capitalising on the personal relationships between brokers and insurers. The problem with many Internet initiatives is that they depersonalise the process. CoverMaker does not."

CoverMaker is already on trial with a number of insurers and brokers from the Broker Network, an organisation of more than 80 brokers placing over £100 million of business a year. Richard Guthrie of Donald Rigg Insurance Brokers, a member of The Broker Network said: "CoverMaker is probably what insurers and brokers have been looking for the past three years or so. It will do more to simplify processes and reduce the masses of paperwork since Lloyds was a coffee shop." Mr Guthrie is one of the brokers currently trialing the new service.

The cost for CoverMaker will also appeal to this segment of the market where expense ratios are under scrutiny. There's no need to invest in new software and operates with only a small commission charge to insurers - initially set at 1% for the early adopters.