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On the cloud
August, 2013
 

The online medium has revolutionised the way businesses across every industry communicate and interact with their customers.

The insurance sector is no exception. Online channels can strip away layers of red tape and procedure in engaging with customers, prospects and counterparts – and securing business.

Qatarlyst provides a webbased platform for insurers, reinsurers and brokers to place business with each other. It does this within a structured workflow, capturing all data in one place and delivering it to counterparty’s back office systems. James Sutherland, CEO, Qatarlyst, explains to Ta’ameen Qatar how technology is shaping the regional insurance industry.

With the growth in smart phone and tablet technology, what are the main online/mobile insurance strategies Qatarlyst has initiated recently?

The web is at the very heart of our offering – and the burgeoning growth of broadband and mobile technologies in the Middle East continues to enable online platforms like ours. Qatarlyst has been building up its database since 2009 and currently has around 140 clients across the region. The new platform we are currently building at Qatarlyst will ultimately be equally accessible from smart phones and tablets as it is from desktops or notebooks.

We recently participated in a pilot using iPads in the London market which worked well. Making an online platform such as Qatarlyst accessible to mobile devices means transactions can happen anywhere, in real time. For brokers, all information can be accessed through their tablet on the spot with a properly-audited record.

In a practical sense, what now are the online platforms enabling regional insurers to grow their brand and cross international borders?

Most companies are allowing their customers to buy online, which effectively creates a new distribution channel. Some insurance companies in Qatar already have a separate online offering for their customers running alongside more traditional faceto- face channels. Qatarlyst’s own platforms are not about us selling insurance through the platform – that’s not what we do. We are about linking counterparties together and we can now give Qatar insurance companies an extended, efficient global and regional reach. We also have a London operation and our ‘next generation’ platform will connect London and MENA markets within a common system, – extending the reach of Doha and Middle East insurance companies into Europe.

To what extent, and in what way, are regional insurance companies harnessing the use of social media?

We use platforms such as Twitter and Facebook as a way of creating informational, interactive communication with customers – also to let people know where you are and how they can talk to you. When we recently attended GAIF for example, we put it on Twitter. More broadly, insurance companies globally are using social media in this way, although it’s still very early days for the region.

What are the main insurance sectors that can potentially benefit from online platforms?

From our own perspective, we focus on the large commercial risk sector and reinsurance – also cases where companies need to cross borders or have a broad scope across domestic markets. A big area of opportunity for insurers is using online channels to reach personal lines customers more efficiently – such as motor, home, health, travel or household insurance.

This is particularly true in Qatar and the wider GCC where awareness of personal insurance is growing. While it is very much in the beginning stages, the online market is really starting to take off in Qatar. As broadband continues to increase in speed, penetration online will grow rapidly.

How might online channels benefit the insurance industry as a whole?

There are benefits in a number of different areas. One is utilisation of the cloud for specialist insurance platforms and offerings, as long as it reduces costs.

Capital expenditure on in-house IT systems is a huge outlay for any company – along with the many operational issues involved.

Conversely, the cloud allows the sharing of costs across a very broad customer base and reduces the need for in-house specialist expertise. This is part of our own proposition at Qatarlyst. It also allows companies to upscale very quickly without huge investment layouts – plus it is very easy to share applications across a number of different offices and still retain control.

Into the future, there will be more and more applications available on the cloud.

Equally, what might be some of the pitfalls and risks of online platforms for insurers?

First and foremost is the issue of security. As a user, it is essential to understand the levels of security your online provider is offering. How solid the company is for example, and if it will still be there tomorrow. One can only imagine the consequences of outsourcing your IT operations to a company that then goes out of operation. Another aspect is disaster recovery – although this could turn out to be either a strength or weakness – depending on the situation. If, for example, your offices are destroyed by fire and you outsource your IT operations on the cloud, you would still be able to access all your data off-site. On the other hand, you need to ensure that the disaster recovery of your provider on the cloud is absolutely watertight in terms of back-up. In the case of Qatarlyst, we have a complete mirror site in Europe that we can switch to almost immediately.

 
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