Broker systems blamed for poor credit insurance sales

Michael Faulkner

Allianz Cornhill is blaming brokers' IT systems for the low take-up of its credit insurance scheme.

Under the scheme, brokers provide Allianz Cornhill with their client lists and the insurer will market credit insurance to the clients on behalf of each broker.

But less than 1% of Allianz Cornhill's broker base has provided full client lists, with only ten brokers out of 3,000 signing up.

The scheme is run in conjunction with credit insurer Euler Hermes, which is also part of the Allianz Group.

Allianz Cornhill marketing and product development manager Mike Powell said that the poor take up was because brokers did not have the client lists available. He said this was due to difficulty in extracting the information from IT systems.

"We have offered to come into brokers' offices and show them how to generate the lists."

But Powell accepted that brokers might not want to release their client lists to the insurer.

"It is true to say that in some circumstances brokers are probably reluctant to release client data to insurers, but we do discuss that issue with brokers when visiting them and hope to erase any concerns."

Powell said that where the insurer had been given client names it had been successful in selling policies for the broker. He gave the example of where a list of 100 names had been provided that had been converted to two sales, amounting to £3,000 for the broker.

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