imarket and the IT Achilles heel

The thorny issue of technology was brought to the fore recently through comments made by brokers in Professional Broking's quarterly Sentiment Survey and a report on the same subject by Defaqto. The latter, Changing Policies for a Changing World, sounded the grim but not entirely unfamiliar warning that "brokers not able to deal with customers on websites and through e-mails in the next two to three years will struggle to survive".

By contrast, respondents to PB's quarterly survey indicated encouraging levels of awareness of the need for technology when dealing with insurers, if not the public, with 89% rating efficient electronic trading facilities from insurers as very or quite important. However while insurers ability to trade electronically was important to the majority, a worryingly low 15% said insurers supporting imarket was very important, which to an observer looks like brokers sealing their own fate.

The complacency brokers have about imarket shows contempt for their own future as it is the strongest technological life line available to them and has the desperately needed quality of being an industry standard solution in the making.

Warnings like Defaqto's are, as mentioned, not uncommon. But warnings by their nature come in a finite supply before their message becomes fact, beyond which options rapidly vanish. Brokers' reluctance is understandable due to insurers failure to deliver in the past but now, at this late stage in the technology game, there is no plan 'B'.

OK, so imarket has over-egged expectation and obviously it is not yet operating at full strength but how can things improve if faced only with scepticism? Brokers need to unite and take the initiative to get more actively involved; feedback to Polaris, lobby decision makers, get on Biba's case to pressurise insurers to sway imarket to make it viable in the way broking needs it to be.

Granted, unprecedented pressures placed on brokers from regulation and competition leave little time for this. However, that makes no difference to technology being a make or break issue because if imarket fails, in the time it takes for plan 'B' to materialise, untold damage will ensue as broking is further dismissed as an unnecessary cost in the chain, leaving whatever value brokers are trying to add otherwise catastrophically undermined.