Will multi-national brokers, the likes of Marsh and Aon, continue to grow and gobble up all the interesting international business? Not if the Worldwide Broker Network (WBN) has anything to say about it. While in London earlier this year, I had a chance to catch up with George Worsley, WBN Executive Director and Alec Finch, Director, Alec Finch & Company Ltd., a WBN member. They told me how their organization of 50-plus independent brokers in more than 30 countries can compete effectively with huge international brokers.
They have two secrets. First because all the WBN brokerages are of manageable size and privately held, they are extremely responsive to the needs of their customers in comparison to the sometimes less urgent 9 to 5 environment of their larger competitors. Second, the network of brokers can work together as one organization on multinational risks by using Riskclick, an ASP collaboration platform (see www.riskclick.com and the September 2001 issue of Sounding Line).
WBN has nine members in the U.S., including Palmer & Cay, William Gallagher Associates, Summit Global Partners, and ABD Insurance and Financial Partners and with more than 40 other partners from Argentina to Zimbabwe. Established in 1989, the network brokers employ about 7,000 people and place more than $7 billion in premium. The group handles a full range of insurance needs from commercial P&C and marine to employee benefits and aviation.
What's different about WBN?
Brokers have been working with one another across national boundaries for years - once using the mails and teletype, then increasingly telephone and FAX, and now e-mail. So what's the big deal about WBN and what's this collaboration software stuff? By sharing a collaboration platform, the group can work as a single team on complex, multi-national risks, collecting information, then acquiring coverage in each country involved.
Here's a real-life example. A broker in the U.S. was handling the insurance needs of a domestic, Midwest-based business. That company decided to acquire a European company with sites all over Europe. The U.S. broker was charged with handling the insurance for the acquisition. That could have been a difficult challenge, but in fact the process went quite smoothly.
The U.S. broker set up a project space on Riskclick, with folders for each country involved. Each country folder held additional folders, one for each insurance area for which information needed to be collected. The U.S. broker then invited the appropriate WBN brokers into the project and each of them went about collecting the appropriate information in their geographic areas and loading it into project folders.
The U.S. Broker found it easy to manage a complex information collection process that involved many organizations in a number of countries. Once the collection process was complete, the U.S. broker could ask the other WBN brokers to find appropriate coverage in their areas. The whole process was highly structured and transparent to everyone involved. Forms entry, e-mail threads, document revisions, and all other activity were automatically tracked - and date and time stamped - to provide a complete picture of the process and audit trail.
The promise of collaboration platforms
I'm a fan of the collaboration software idea, but because it's so new, there are few concrete examples to point to. The WBN and its use of Riskclick is one such example and over time we'll point to more. Within the WBN, collaboration is among its broker members, but collaboration can also make sense between a producer and prospect and between a producer and potential markets in a domestic environment. Collaboration projects can also make sense in complex claims cases.
Overall the concept of collaboration software is to make it easy for people who are separated by geographic and organizational boundaries to work together on ad hoc and generally limited duration projects. Lotus Notes is one example of collaboration software, but is most appropriate for use within one enterprise. Riskclick, a more recent example, uses the Internet to make collaboration services available worldwide and easily accessible.
For more information, see www.wbnglobal.com. For more information on Riskclick, see www.riskclick.com.
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