Insurance Times speaks to Joe Sultana, managing director, broker solutions, Applied Systems UK on the growth of Applied in the UK and reaction to the high rating in the Insurance Times 2019 eTrading Survey

Applied Systems secured second place in the in the Insurance Times 2019 eTrading survey, improving year on year since its first inclusion three years ago. What do you attribute this to?

I’ll start by thanking our brokers for continuing to support Applied and also our insurer partners for providing the quality products to enable our brokers to deliver the right policy competitively priced and deliver a complete service to their customers.

Joe Sultana

Joe Sultana, MD of broker solutions at Applied Systems

Applied continues to invest in etrading and as a result, we are experiencing increased adoption among brokers. We will continue to listen to customers feedback about how we can improve our etrading processes so we can keep providing the level of service our customers expect.

Applied also performed very well in data analytics and reporting in the survey. Why you feel you performed well in this area and also inform brokers who are less aware of the capabilities of Applied in this growing area?

We feel that data analytics and reporting are critical to insurance brokers so they can make informed decisions about their businesses.

Brokers have rich data within their management systems, and Applied enables them to access and take advantage of that data in a visual way.

Flexible reporting tools within Applied’s management systems enable brokers to increase visibility into their books of business for company-wide evaluation.

System security was also an area Applied performed strongly in, why do you think brokers have confidence in your security practises and protocols?

Applied operates the largest purpose-built cloud in the insurance industry with 100,000+ users, so we take security extremely seriously.

Our brokers have peace of mind knowing their businesses are protected with access to operations recovery, backup encryption and four data centres across four different regions with data centre pairing and 99.99% uptime.

What are Applied’s aims and objectives for the year ahead?

For the year ahead, Applied is heavily focused on continuing to bring Applied Epic to the UK market. We already have brokers with unique business models, such as high-volume personal and commercial lines live on Applied Epic and now we have the opportunity of expanding to even more brokers.

Additionally, we will continue to invest in etrading so that our brokers can more easily interact with their insurer partners to access a wide range of products, serve customers more efficiently and build more profitable insurers relationships. We will also focus on mobile to ensure our broker customers and their customers have access to their information anytime, anywhere via customer self-service portals and mobile apps for customers and staff.

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The Insurance Times eTrading Report contains insights from over 750 brokers across the U.K, to enquire about acquring the report please click here

Lastly, we will use our partnership with Google to fuel our innovations to digitally transform the industry, in areas such as chatbots, machine learning and AI.

We hear many new brokers are adopting Applied’s broker management software, what has been the feedback from brokers and what challenges have you faced as each brokerage have different needs?

We are very excited about the tremendous interest and adoption in Applied Epic and the Digital Broker solution thus far. As each customer has their own set of needs and challenges based on their business model, we create our software to be highly customisable so they can configure the technology to create efficiency and profitability.

With several recent successful implementations of new systems under our belt, we are proud of Team Applied and our customer partners for the rigorous planning, project management and working relationships that have resulted in smooth transitions.