AXA and Acturis have introduced functionality improvements that may increase imarket broker uptake.
Insurance Times has reported that AXA and Acturis have entered into a collaboration to enable electronic MTAs across the full range of AXA’s SME products. This addresses a concern of imarket users about how they would process business should the requirement for an alteration arise in a policy agreed through imarket. Such a capability is common in motor or household insurance via Electronic Data Interchange, or EDI, trading, but, until now, it has been lacking in imarket.
Feedback from the broking community regarding the boost in functionality has been positive as it makes conducting MTAs on relatively straightforward SME policies much easier and faster for brokers. Turnaround times for MTAs have greatly improved as an adjustment quote, with documentation, can be obtained from the insurer in less than a minute; while policy documentation can be sent to the client within 30 seconds of client approval.
However, for the insurance industry, the most important result of AXA and Acturis’ work on enabling electronic MTAs may be the increased use of the imarket electronic trading platform the improved functionality is likely to result in.
In a recent Datamonitor survey of commercial insurance brokers, it was found that the majority of respondents transact less than 4% of their business through the online portal, while over 30% do not have access to imarket at all. This reveals that there are a significant number of potential and existing clients that imarket could target to either join or increase their use of the system. As the changes introduced by AXA and Acturis look likely to benefit both brokers and consumers, the increased functionality they will offer may lead to increased broker uptake and should give imarket a much-needed boost.