Fresh Insurance

Fresh Insurance Services Group LTD. is one of the United Kingdom’s largest privately owned personal insurance brokerages.

The company’s 160-strong employees sell auto, home, and motor trade insurance. Fresh Insurance prides itself on its wide range of products, which reflects a diverse customer base. The firm has won awards for its quality performance, including the Personal Lines Broker of the Year award in 2013. 

Situation

Fresh Insurance has five steering committees that oversee and improve compliance and other operations throughout the organization. The committee members, who often work remotely, must share project documentation and ideas.

To collaborate, these managers often downloaded files on their own laptops, and emailed attached documents and messages, says Fresh Insurance IT Director Andrew Tatton. Also, the company established two separate data centers, without an internal central document repository, for storing and accessing the content and data. This caused productivity snarls and file versioning difficulties, and there was no systematic way to monitor project progress.

Because this hybrid system had security gaps, the company decided to select a virtual file collaboration system. It adopted Dropbox, an online file sync and share (FSS) solution. However, Dropbox was unable to meet all of Fresh Insurance’s security requirements.

For the next two years, Fresh Insurance used another file sharing service, Workshare. But the steering committee members wanted greater control and security for their content. A sales call and demo was all it took to convince Tatton to migrate to Intralinks, an online collaboration and data sharing solution.

“I would not have taken Intralinks to my board in the first place if I hadn’t had the utmost confidence it could deliver,” Tatton explains. “From my first contact with the Intralinks website, I got the feeling of quality, and that drives confidence.”

Solution

Among its key capabilities, Intralinks leverages a secure and scalable content services platform, developed specifically for highly regulated industries. But Intralinks also has a streamlined interface that allows managers and staff to quickly locate the most current version of a shared document.

And Intralinks enables a casual user to view or synchronize with any necessary files quickly, as needed. Users can arrange the solution’s Workspaces by grouping together various projects; they can also store files in a specific project.

Another Intralinks plus is the transparent licensing model, which allows Fresh Insurance to pay a set fee, and have access to as much storage as needed. “We know what we’re paying each month, and not facing a rude shock around the corner,” says Tatton.

Benefits

Using Intralinks, Fresh Insurance steering committee members increased collaboration productivity by 30-35 percent. The solution’s Outlook plug-in also reduced the reliance on email, increasing efficiency and data protection. And because Intralinks is secure and easily accessible to project stakeholders, it supports the company’s compliance and governance processes.

Managers can track steering committee project activity closely. “At any point, you can see what another person’s contribution is, and that enables us to really work together,” explains Tatton. “You know that employees are using the system and doing what you asked them to do. That capability wasn’t available before.”

Tatton discovered new ways to deploy Intralinks he hadn’t foreseen. For instance, the IT department uses the solution to store and share reference manuals with the company’s end users, even when these users are remote.

The solution also has helped the compliance steering committee to review and approve customer sales scripts. And Fresh Insurance uses a Workspace to share audio files with insurers (whose products the brokerage resells). The audio files are easily accessed, but have a fixed expiration date. After the deadline, Intralinks’ UNshare^® capabilities make the files inaccessible — except by special permission. Overall, the solution enables doing business the way Fresh Insurance is most naturally productive. As Tatton says: “We can access and interact with Intralinks VIA’s Workspaces in the same way we regularly work.”