Ex-Aviva director going “full steam ahead” with recruiting brokers to big data platform

Ex-Aviva distribution director Fraser Edmond wants to have 100 regional independent brokers signed up to his big data platform Broker Insights by this time next year.

The platform, which went live at the end of September, takes data from brokers and offers it to insurers, which pay for the efficiency of finding the right business with smaller brokers they wouldn’t usually speak with.

Zurich, AXA, Ecclesiatical and QBE this month signed up to the platform. Hiscox had already signed up in June.

Edmond revealed to Insurance Times he hopes to have his final panel of eight insurers signed up by the end of 2018. Talks are at an advanced stage with three more similarly-sized insurers.

But Edmond accepted the value in the proposition only rises as the number of brokers offering up their data increases.

He said: “Our intention is to sign up as many regional brokers as we can,” he said.

The platform launched with 15 carefully selected regional brokers, with Edmond saying he had a pipeline of another 45 brokers he was looking to bring into the platform soon.

“We had to get a critical mass of insurers before we could start actively recruiting the brokers,” he said.

“Now the platform is live and ready its full speed ahead with broker recruitment.”

Renumeration

Brokers are paid a fee by Broker Insights for adding their data to the platform.

As the number of brokers grows, the renumeration to be paid by the insurers will also grow.

“The insurers pay for access to the platform and we share some of that with supporting brokers,” he said.

“As we get more brokers the opportunity gets greater and greater for insurers because there’s more business in the platform.

“If there’s 100 brokers in a year’s time it will cost more than it costs today.”

All the partner insurers are signed up to one-year contracts, and Edmond revealed he was also at less-advanced talks with two other potential insurers.

The model aims to keep the number of partner insurers at eight to maintain a decent competitive advantage over non-partner rivals. But Edmond said he would remain loyal to those insurers that had supported Broker Insights from the outset.

Edmond said: “The people we are working with today we will continue to work with. They have supported us in the early stages, so they will be the people we work with unless something changes.

“Those insurers that have supported us since day one have done so on the basis that they expect us to sign up a decent number of brokers over the next year, and this is what we plan to do.”

Galvanising

Since January, Edmond has grown the team from the original three founding directors, to a team of 13 including software developers, data scientists and four regional sales managers to sign up new brokers to the platform.

But Edmond said he is confident they can hit and possibly exceed their target of 100 brokers by next year.

“It’s solving a market problem,” he said. “That problem is that insurers themselves cannot meet every market broker in the UK because they don’t have the resources to do that.

“If you’re a small or medium sized regional broker you struggle to get attention from all of the big insurers. What we’re doing solves that problem.”

And he said it was another antidote to consolidation that was championing the independent regional broker.

He added: “It’s all about galvanising the smaller brokers. By pulling all the data into one place it improves the insurer’s search capability to find exactly the business they’re looking for. By having that information at their finger-tips you can imagine it will transform the relationship.”