MGA’s

Being an MGA you’ll know it’s about putting away the blunderbuss and getting out the rifle. You’re speciality no matter the space is why you exist, coincidentally the manoeuvrability that comes from your size and systems means that you could be benefiting from further differentiation potentially helping highlight you further as one to do business with.

As you already know 4bi is in the security fulfilment business what you may not know is that most of the clients we help look after have come to us through an insurance related introduction. Whether that be a Household client needing or wanting the installation of security or a Business that can’t get cover without it, most of what we do have come through a Risk Management channel.

In preparing to write these words I did the obligatory Google search principally to ensure that my understanding of what an MGA was wasn’t too far from the truth…. so many flavours. Thankfully I wasn’t surprised and my understanding was okay albeit somewhat simplified; my glib belief being that MGA’s reached those parts that other insurance can’t; this, in my mind was either due to specialisation or inflexible systems, let me explain.

When setting up the BCRU, the Social Enterprise that runs the ‘Insurance with Security’ initiative we held lots of meetings with the big insurers in an effort to understand why they did what they did in the small business space. Loads of interesting things came out of those meetings but the thing that in this context jumped out the most was the fact that the big boys had grown by acquisition or merger and that even today, rather than tackle the complexities of merging their IT systems they simply continued to run them as separate systems. One senior person stating “sadly we haven’t one got a terminal we can go to to make the changes we’d like to make, we still run over 30 legacy systems”.

It may be wrong of me to highlight this extreme case of some of the IT difficulties traditional insurers have in catering for areas of specialisation and I am fully aware that lots of MGS are being set-up to address the volume market with schemes and alike, but the fact remains that doing this with Risk Management as a mantra throughout certainly wouldn’t damage the bottom line.

So we would like to hear from you if you think there’s some merit in exploring things further.

Richard Green, MD 4bi. T: 0203 006 0461 Ext 4611