With recent pressure on the domestic general insurance market it is no secret that many brokers are now looking to enhance their income by attacking the commercial insurance market, both at corporate & SME levels. You may well argue that this has always been the case however, big players in the domestic car insurance and home insurance areas such as aggregators, direct writers are now paying attention to the commercial insurance market, an example of this is the Towergate deal with Confused.com. Other online traders are signing up to offer commercial insurances ranging from Professional Indemnity Insurance to Public and Employers Liability for tradesmen and woman. Where does it all end up, well probably in two camps the have’s and have’ not’s, by that we mean those brokers who readily accept the challenge of the direct writer & aggregator sites by having their own online Quote and Buy Systems which they can choose their own suppliers for, or get a bolt on ready made list of insurers to choose from.
Unfortunately insurers are still very slow to believe in this type of technology and have pretty closed ears to any new players or ideas and there are a lot of people shouting about how good and much they know about internet and mobile trading, but in reality there’s only 4 or 5 real players in the commercial SME and Corporate markets that have got it right.
