This is part of a series of articles sponsored by Britam.

In the late 90s, things weren’t running smoothly at Britam – then a purely insurance business going by the name British-American Insurance. The company relied on a manual system to record data on how many insurance policies it sold and to whom. Read how Britam came to rely on this system here.

This manual system had loopholes that allowed insurance payments to be diverted resulting in losses. To add on to this, the sales staff was de-motivated by frequent delays in  their commissions because of the outdated system. In any case, the number of Britam’s insurance clients was growing ever larger and it became impossible to keep track of them manually.

Something had to give.

In March 1998, something did. The insurance company implemented a computerized system called “CISS”. With CISS, client details could be found at the click of a button instead of poring over manual records. Customer service improved and unpaid commissions were settled promptly which boosted staff morale. Capturing data and processing premiums became much easier and with this the sales staff vigorously expanded sales towards the countryside.

However, CISS was not an online system and this meant that uploaded data on premiums and clients could only be accessed once a month when the system was updated. At times, the system would fail making such information inaccessible for longer than a month. These failures would effectively freeze an entire month’s transactions including policies issued, premium history, claims and changes of client addresses. Moreover, despite the fact that CSS was a largely digital system, it still needed cumbersome manual intervention in some cases. For example, changing a client’s address in the system was described as “a nightmare” and so was making corrections in the data once it had been fed into the system. These issues highlighted CSS’s inherent flaws which even drove Britam staff to revert to manual records in order to correct errors made in CSS. The system needed improvements.

With the apparent need to eliminate drawbacks with CSS and develop new insurance products, in 2004 Britam implemented “IGAS” - a new operational system that was online. Although transferring data posed a challenge during implementation, IGAS had several benefits. Insurance premiums could now issued in an instant to match the needs of customers who had developed unique needs by this time. IGAS gave Britam the flexibility and efficiency to cross the 1 billion shilling mark in premiums paid. The system is still in use today. In 2011, Britam grossed over 5.5 billion shillings in insurance premiums from its clients.

In the same year IGAS was rolled out, British-American Asset Managers was formed making Britam a fully-fledged financial services company. Britam now offers a range of financial products including Life Insurance, Pensions, Health Insurance, General Insurance, Unit Trust Funds, Investment Planning, Wealth Management, Offshore Investments, Retirement Planning and Discretionary Portfolio Management.