More than 800 brokers packed the auditorium at Birmingham's Motorcycle Museum this week to hear details of Insureright, the IIB's ambitious new internet venture.
Brokers were told Insureright is poised to revolutionise the e-commerce market place.
IIB director general, Andrew Paddick launched the scheme in dramatic fashion, walking through a cloud of dry ice and flinging his arms wide open to shout "Insureright is ready for business. Are You?"
He added later: "There is no broker in the UK who can afford not to have this technology.
"If a broker is not on-line, they will be squeezed out of the market."
Paddick said he had already been approached by a number of brokers willing to sign up for Insureright.
But support for the venture was more muted in the auditorium itself.
Pricing was the main concern of many brokers but others winced at the prospect of still having to enter all the details of internet customers into their back-office systems. The price includes a joining fee, monthly fees, separate fees for each quote, including extra charges for each insurer and another charge if the customer makes a purchase.
Added to the charges were costs for DVLC details (essential for making internet quotes fast enough) and for credit card use or customer credit facilities.
The IIB sample charge was based on just ten insurers being quoted, but many brokers queried why they would want to restrict a quote to just ten when other insurers were available. Each extra insurer added another penny to the charge, even for the time-wasters many brokers expected through web-based broking. This was given added weight by the lack of marketing spend Insureright proposed.
Insureright has said it will make available the internet information as a datastream so any back-office supplier can integrate it, but brokers were disappointed that it had not been able to convince a single back-office supplier to sign.
The IIBs promise that Mavern, the technology partner within Insureright, would make its own system available, raised concerns that brokers using Insureright may be tied to just one back-office system provider.
Others at the event were concerned that it was the wrong system for their sort of business anyway.
One high net worth broker said: "We had a client who had bought his wife a £9,500 Rolex watch and was going to Rome for the weekend. He wanted to give it to her as a present so he asked that we didn't send him any paperwork confirming the watch was insured. We won't be able to give that level of service through this system."
But most brokers appeared to realise the need to be able to trade, communicate with customers and provide mid-term adjustments on the internet.
