It is not normal that the business insurance industry is at the vanguard of IT developments. I remember being told, when I started out 25 years ago, that we would soon move to becoming paperless.
In our main office, we have around 4,000 clients and, we have to keep paper records of everything. Every phone call, email, post or fax has to go on the file, either the original or one of our notes. As you can imagine, this means that we have some serious amounts of filing. We have considered scanning, but I have this belief, albeit at the back of my mind, about what would happen if everything we scanned disappeared? We are told that this cannot happen, but the ones that tell us this are the sales staff from the scanning companies.
In addition to the scanning, we have to keep a hard record anyway. We would need to have a warehouse somewhere else for all our papers to be kept. Maybe one day we will get round to trusting these firms but at the moment, we are happy with our paper records.
So, as far as this side goes, we are not quite at the forefront of anything. Paper always has and, for my lifetime, always will rule the day. But we are an innovative business insurance broker. We trade in a different way to the significant majority of brokers. As a step forward from this, we will be launching our very own business insurance app. We have had to take a gamble, do we go for Android or Apple first? Having looked around and checked with my peers, it has to be Android. We will develop a similar one for Apple soon, but the plans are by the end of quarter three, 2011, we will have one up and running. Watch this space of feel free to let us have any thoughts on what you would want to include.