Tech review: When cheaper doesn’t mean worse

This week Mark Loosmore of AT8 Group looks under the bonnet of Assureweb and finds a portal beginning to find its feet in the wider market.

We have been following the fortunes of the various portals over the past months and were pleased to see some promising developments and signs of growth in their usage. One of the fastest growing services we looked at was Assureweb.

Assureweb was formed in 1998 and has been through a number of incarnations and ownership models, but it is currently owned by a number of the large product providers who continue to support the portal to ensure strong competition exists in the market. According to our latest survey, Assureweb has more than a fifth of the quotation request market.

Core module

The obvious, if somewhat crude, place to start a review of Assureweb, is the commercial models of the distributors using the service. Put simply, its core module is free. Assureweb makes its money from the transactions and quote volumes it produces for the product provider and has helped win several of the larger distributor deals in the market. It does however charge for the tailoring of the service or the integration of it to other key systems.

In the past, the perception has been that it is cheap because its provider or product coverage was poor. Of course, the lack of coverage would not prevent some of the larger tied distributors or those operating a limited panel, but it might be a disincentive to some of the fiercely-independent IFAs.

In fact, Assureweb now provides a wide coverage of the market. It still has some gaps in its range when compared to Avelo Exchange, for example, but it is as good or better than the remaining solutions in the market.

While the pricing strategy is a key factor in the Assureweb story, it should not detract from its differentiated positioning in the market when compared to its competition. In essence, Assureweb is positioned as an invisible service or utility for other software packages to use to obtain quotes. It has its own portal service which uses the quotation utility making the service available directly to end-users, but frequently the service will be accessed via a back-office system such as Intelliflo or Swift.

When used by these other software packages, the service is hidden behind their user interfaces and therefore the end user experience is seamless.

Independent edge

It has branded its ‘black box’ capability as APe (Assureweb Powered eBusiness) and this has for some time been used for its protection service. While it was reserved for this line of business only, APe’s uptake was always going to be limited. However, we have now seen this spread through its annuity service and, most recently, to its bond quotation service.

Other portals have similar ‘black box’ capability, but it is the independence of the Assureweb technology that has given it the edge when working with third parties. The focus on being an independent specialist quotation service though does create a more fragile business model, and if the need for an aggregator of e-business services decreases, there are few other services that it offers that will protect its business.