Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) is to close its marketing arms Key Sure and Advantage with affected brokers being offered membership of Key Choice instead.
The two marketing arms, Advantage which has 150 members, and KeySure, which has 250 members, will cease to operate from December 31, this year.
Key Choice managing director, Nick Bate, said he anticipated "some erosion" in terms of membership numbers, mostly coming from brokers who were not prepared to embrace full cycle EDI.
In total Key Choice managing director Nick Bate said around 80 brokers would be lost with approximately 50 going from Key Sure and 30 from Advantage.
The news follows CSC's announcement in August that all its marketing groups were to be reviewed.
Bate said: "We do expect some reduction of members because some brokers won't want to improve their systems."
In future, Key Choice will demand that all its brokers have full EDI capabilities or risk losing their membership.
At the moment, it is believed approximately 70% of the Key Sure membership operates full cycle EDI. That figure is far lower among Advantage members.
Bate said one of the reasons for moving members from Advantage to Key Choice was to offer them a greater choice of products.
CSC said that the switch had not occurred sooner because the Quotel system (a recent CSC merger partner) needed to be improved first.
The decision to close Advantage is somewhat surprising, though, because it only recently won industry awards for the service it provided brokers.
Key Choice said its forthcoming priorities will be to improve management information to insurers, concerning the business conducted by Key Choice membership.
Bate said: "This is the final review and we have focused. Key Choice is the single marketing arm and any changes in the future will be part of an on-going analysis."
