Insurance Set for Record Sales With ‘Value Added E-Retail Application’

Lagos, Apr 06, 2010 (Daily Champion/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) -- THE Nation's insurance industry would soon witness a boom in sales volume as companies align to value added e-retail applications, a fast growing technology that would address challenges of low market penetration, product distribution and innovation.

The new technology is coming on the heels of perceived bottlenecks on sales and marketing of insurance products which have created a gap on local client intimacy between the insured and the insurance companies.

The implication of this anomaly is the inability of the insurance companies to tap from the mass market leading to low growth of industry's premium despite the countries population.

Though there is a lot of money coming from corporate clients, experts believe that much could be achieved if the retail market is developed, as retail sales drive economy in advanced climes.

In this vein, experts emphasise the need for companies to adopt valued added technologies to boost market penetration and create large base insurance culture among the populace.

Explaining the application in an interview, the Managing Director Botcom System, Bunmi Okunowo said in aiding the aggressive market penetration by the insurance companies, his company developed a value-added insurance e-retail application for the insurance companies.

The solution which is fast gaining popularity in the country Okunowo said delivers the value of local client intimacy between the insurance companies and their customers. While the channel distributions he said are still maintained, their operations are more effective and efficient in dissolving the hurdles of policy purchase, premium renewal and interaction with the insurance companies.

According to him, within a year of using the platform, some of the insurance companies have been able to realise revenue in the high range of the six digit figures and above, due to unprecedented new policy sales in the mass markets.

At the moment Royal Exchange plc has keyed into the programme and many others are in the verge of sealing deals for the platform.

The value added e-Retail application, which is first of its kind in Nigeria, enables insurance companies to sell their innovative life products, as well as general, to the mass population in form of cash or scratch cards or ATM cards through their mobile phones or Web.

Okunowo said Botcomm working with the insuranceindustry has enabled it build a simple-to-use value added application that unifies both mobile and web platforms thereby allowing the consumers in the mass market to transact business with their insurance company in an easy, transparent and cost effective way. "Within their comfort, customers use the technology to buy policy in real time. The same platform allows the insurance companies to run the full insurance value chain with ease, more efficiency and accuracy. It can integrate with the existing insurance application with ease for process and data integration such as Premia among others.

What the application does to our client is to reduce insurance value chain complexity and promote greater efficiency, streamlines processing and reduces cycle times and human intervention.

Botcomm Systems Limited is an software development company, with strong capability in IT consultancy, enterprise IT infrastructure build, Enterprise application deployment, network infrastructure, application infrastructure and IT operations. Botcomm has an unbridled passion for using technology to solve our client's business problems.

Its strength lies not just in the high-end mastery of the technical field of computing and the various information technologies, but in its ability to apply these skills within client's business domain for their benefit.