The power to have distinctive, cutting-edge, customizable dealer software program was one of many key causes behind digital brokerage Cheep Insurance coverage’s resolution to partner with Southampton Monetary, the brokerage’s president tells Canadian Underwriter.
On July 2, insurance coverage funding group Southampton Monetary introduced its fairness partnership with WebBroker Canada Inc., the driving power behind Cheep Insurance coverage. The deal helps present the house and auto brokerage with superior know-how.
Cheep Insurance coverage is a specialty brokerage that offers principally with non-standard clients, corresponding to drivers who’ve had beforehand cancelled auto insurance coverage insurance policies, accidents, claims, and convictions, explains brokerage president Steve Earle.
“And once you’re coping with a dealer administration system that’s designed actually for everybody, it was actually difficult to be distinctive and afford any sort of customization,” Earle stated. “The software program accessible to us as we speak is supposed for the widespread denominator.
“And Cheep may be very distinctive. It’s not a conventional dealer in that sense, so it wants untraditional IT.”
If Cheep Insurance coverage desires to do issues in a different way technologically, it has to “put individuals on it versus know-how on it,” Earle explains. Nonetheless, the partnership gives a better stage of automation and extra open-source connections with insurers and different distributors.
The transition to Southampton’s digital platform will take a while.
“We’re not going to transition instantly,” he provides. “We’ve got to develop a roadmap for that as a result of clearly, it’s very difficult. However we’re 4 to eight months with a view to re-platform ourselves…”
Cheep can also be seeking to develop into Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, Earle says, with a deliberate Ontario enlargement coming in about two months. The cope with Southampton helps with scale, regulatory compliance, governance and authorized elements.
“Cheep is attention-grabbing as a result of it doesn’t have a bodily location in any respect. It by no means has. It’s all the time been a 100% digital brokerage.”
Particular person brokerage wants will dictate whether or not a enterprise desires to go along with a partnership, an outright or partial, or so on, Earle says. “None of them are unsuitable.”
In his case, he didn’t need his brokerage to turn into a part of one other model and lose a little bit of its identification. “For us, if we now have a singular worth proposition in coping with specialty clients which have distinctive wants, we have to keep our individualism and the character that comes with us…”
Function picture by iStock.com/Midnight Studio
