FirstAssist extends to small businesses

FirstAssist Insurance Services has launched a small business insurance proposition which will allow distributors to take full advantage of the growth potential in the market.

FirstAssist’s marketing and distribution solution is designed to overcome the obstacles which prevent banks, building societies, affinity players and brokers from maximising their earnings in this market.

FirstAssist’s end-to-end white-label proposition claims to solve these problems and provides a suite of SME products and services, supported by administration, underwriting and claims services.

Alistair Hardie, managing director of speciality insurance at FirstAssist Insurance Services, said: “Our proposition makes it easy for affinity partners and brokers to sell small business insurance. We’re not only providing a trading platform that’s simple to use, but we will also actively work with our partners to maximise their sales, leveraging our considerable expertise in multi-channel distribution to do so.

“Few of the larger financial organisations have platforms that allow them to offer instant quotes at the point-of-sale. Our technology addresses this with a solution which is designed to integrate seamlessly into our partners’ processes and systems."

FirstAssist will initially provide over 250 trade specific products and has plans to broaden this to include over 90% of all businesses in the SME sector in early 2010.

The small business proposition will primarily target businesses with up to 50 employees.

RSA is the primary provider of the underwriting capacity for the insurance offered by the FirstAssist proposition.

Hardie concluded: “Small business insurance is a logical extension to our commercial offering and builds on our position as a leading provider of specialist insurance solutions. Our solution meets the demand from many existing partners seeking to improve commercial insurance penetration rates with their own SME customers, whilst maximising their revenue potential.”