E-trading: a good thing?

One of the first hot topics covered by the Gracechurch-BIBA survey was inevitably e-trading. At a simple level we just wanted to know how many brokers were e-trading and how regularly, and we got the answers to those two questions – around six in ten are e-trading regularly and Polaris UK estimates that 500,000+ policies were digitally traded last year. The survey also shows that brokers are quite positive about digital trading, seeing it as being generally helpful to the customer experience.

The fly in the ointment however is that most also experience ‘computer says no’ moments regularly.

Getting the sweet-spot between tech and human intervention is really the key to success, but in practice quite hard to get right, so these results are being discussed with various groups including the ITIC Committee at BIBA, the tech providers, brokers and carriers. Already ideas and potential solutions are coming up in the discussions, and we’ll be taking this forward more formally as a Service Quality Workstream (SQW).