Following the announcement that
Sportscover and the Hamilton Group had finalised a deal that will see the underwriting arm of the Melbourne-based firm change hands, the company has promised limited local change.
Steve Boucher, marketing and business development director at
Sportscover, noted that the partnership will mean little in the short term for the Australian side of the business.
“With Sportscover Australia it means very little," Boucher said.
“It’s business as usual, there will be no changes whatsoever in the short term here.
“Basically, any brokers that we deal with now, will still see the same people at Sportscover, they’ll talk to those people whether they are underwriters or claims people and they’ll still get the same policies as the policies are still written by the Sportscover Syndicate 3334.
“Short term, and I suspect for a lot of the medium term, there will be no change at all.”
Boucher said that while it will be quiet on the Australian front for now, the company is looking to diversify its products and lines whilst sticking to the sports and leisure space and developing its offering in New Zealand and Asia.
“More locally, we’ve been working and developing the business into New Zealand and parts of Asia but I think having Hamilton and the capital backing will help in terms of how we can speed up the process of that development.
“I think what we will see is the business growing quite rapidly but we’ll also see us taking bigger lines, we’ll start to introduce more scope to the products, different lines maybe diversify but still keeping our speciality in terms of sports and leisure because that’s what we know and that’s what our strength is.”
The Hamilton Group will also give Sportscover a foot in the lucrative American market that the company has eyed for several years and Boucher believes the partnership will pay dividends in the long run.
“It was important that we got it right. We’ve been looking for some time now to get the right partner – we had a few false starts unfortunately but it was worth the wait because we believe that in Hamilton we’ve found exactly the right partner. They have a similar ethos to us and they see the vision as we see it.
“I think we are going to have a very strong partnership going forward.”
