Insurance technology company SSP New Zealand will move to a local data host to avoid a repeat of recent disruptions to its broker clients, caused by a power cut at its UK data centre.

The August 26 outage caused the UK parent’s cloud-based Pure Broking platform to fail, leaving 306 brokers offline for up to three weeks.

Affected New Zealand underwriter Andrew McFetridge, MD of Rosser Underwriting, told insuranceNEWS.com.au he has accepted a goodwill arrangement with SSP NZ and he expects to see marked improvements in the system under local data hosting.

While the past two months have been “frustrating”, he describes communications with SSP NZ Country Manager Sam Finkle as “very good”.

“We’re back on board now, largely back functioning as before the outage,” Mr McFetridge said. “There were a few glitches, which they’ve rectified.”

Mr Finkle told insuranceNEWS.com.au SSP is “days away” from signing a deal with a regional host, and the move should be completed by the end of February.

“We’re [also] putting in additional safeguards to our network, to mitigate this stuff from happening again,” he said.

Last week UK brokers again experienced major disruptions to the SSP system over two days. This latest failure did not affect New Zealand brokers.

The British Insurance Brokers’ Association (BIBA) expressed dissatisfaction with SSP’s handling of the affair, saying it is yet to receive assurances about a resolution.

CEO Steve White says BIBA is “extremely concerned” with SSP’s problems and “apparent lack of clear communication to users”.

“Software houses are now a vital and integral part of the infrastructure of the insurance market,” he said. “It is not unreasonable for brokers, who are likely to have invested a considerable amount of money in key systems, to expect that system to work fully and that when there is an issue for it to be resolved quickly.”