When I joined Brokerslink less than a year ago, I saw it as an exciting new opportunity, but with a lot of challenges! I see opportunities to continue to grow by empowering local retail brokers, making sure they have what they need in terms of the facilities, products and services they can provide to their clients. But the challenge is to find the most efficient ways to utilise all the knowledge and skills we have as a large global group and deploy the expertise from our specialised brokers into our retail brokers. We need to make sure they have not only the tools and knowledge, but also the training materials they need, as well as access to increased capacity from top carriers.  It is a win-win situation, because if our brokers are geared to make more business, everyone makes more business and we grow and become a more solid global broking firm.

My first priority was to develop products, services, facilities and software tools for the entire network to use and access online in a very simple and efficient way. At our Global Conference in October we launched Agora, an online portal which provides all partners and affiliates with a platform for communication, knowledge-sharing and access to real business products and services via an online marketplace. 

This online marketplace gives brokers direct access to specific risks, details about the coverage, limits and conditions, as well as sales materials that they can then download to use with their end client. Agora is accessible to all our partners and affiliates and it’s been good to see quote requests coming in. Since the Hong Kong Conference, we have already worked on new products and risk management services, knowing that the solutions we offer will only continue to evolve. For example, a new product which was recently added to the marketplace is Active Assailant cover provided by SafeOnline. This product relates to the risk of any individual person carrying out a premeditated attack using a vehicle, explosive device or any handheld weapon. It is a topical subject particularly for entities that are open to the public. This policy does not require any political trigger to cover property damage and bodily injury losses sustained after an attack of this nature.

Over the coming months, the biggest challenge for me will be to get a deeper understanding of the needs of our brokers. We will be doing surveys and webinars to promote everything that is already available on the online marketplace and also give us an opportunity to get a better feel of the next steps for us in terms of potential business opportunities.  As well as these initiatives, we will continue to enhance our relationship with strategic insurers and have regional meetings for Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and the Americas.

These developments will continue to fill gaps of expertise that we might need in some regions and offer new facilities that might be interesting to develop worldwide.

I’m really enjoying my role with Brokerslink, it’s extremely interesting as every broker and risk consulting company is different. It’s good to see the cohesion between the partners and affiliates, some of them have known each other for a long time and regularly do business together, but you also have the new ones joining and being integrated very quickly because the atmosphere is both professional and friendly. The year ahead is going to be an exciting time for our partners and affiliates and I’m looking forward to help developing our support for them.