As a business insurance broker, we have to balance the insurers rhetoric, about premium increases, with public perception that you can always get a bargain if you look around long enough. Over the past three or four years, insurers have been hit with the perfect storm elements of reduced customer base, reduced investment income and increased costs of losses. As a result, they are looking to make up for their under-pricing over the years by putting through above inflation increases on all classes of business.

If you watch the television or read the papers or the net, you will always fund someone that advocates shopping around. Bargains are there to be had apparently. But, when you are looking at a physical product, such as a branded pair of trainers or a television, you know what you are getting. Whether you buy the product from retailer A, B or C, you will get the same thing. The differences may be in the terms of the warranty provided, but the actual product is identical.

Contrast this with a business insurance policy, and the waters get a little bit murky. What we mean by this, is that unless you purchase an identical policy from the same insurer then you are always going to get differences. We have said this before, long and hard, that this is where you need a broker. A brokers role is to act for you, the customer, and to look for the best deal available, price, cover and service wise. We have one insurer, that we no longer deal with. Their prices were good, their products were good, but their claims service was terrible. If they were not looking to repudiate a claim, they would spend way, way too long sorting the claim out. 

But what is to stop you dealing with this company on a direct basis? Nothign unfortunately. They sell the same products over the net and I fear for any customer that does not have a broker to fight their corner in the event of a loss.

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.