The newest addition to the Steadfast family National Credit Insurance Brokers is growing its business with the launch of two new products, revealing companies are increasingly turning to it for assistance in retrieving money from debtors.
NCIB managing director Kirk Cheesman this week told Insurance Business, being part of the cluster group was a great fit, and said business, in the relatively unknown market, is booming.
“It’s great to be part of the Steadfast family. Steadfast is the largest broking group in Australia. Being part of an excellent group, run by great people with great experience is a great mix.”
The broker claims to be the only intermediary with its offering, revealing that it plans to launch two new branded products later this year – Uselect and CoverGap.
NCIB said CoverGap is an IT solution which will wash a client’s debtors ledger against their endorsed credit limits to find any uninsured “gaps”. NCIB said it enables its clients to immediately apply for additional cover, via NCINet to close any gaps in cover.
To assist its client in assessing new and existing customers, NCIB has launched USelect, allowing companies to cherry-pick the information they want NCIB to obtain on clients.
“We are not trying to compete with ASIC with USelect but when a company wants a forensic analysis on specific information on a customer, that’s where we can help,’ Cheesman said.
But he added: “Trade credit is still our focus. The newer products will enhance the performance of trade credit insurance, to avoid claims and minimise risk at the same time.
Cheesman said the trade credit insurance market is relatively unsaturated but business is still good despite the global financial crisis (GFC) ending in 2008/9.
“The GFC was a difficult period for a lot of businesses in the collecting debts and collecting debts from companies that were going insolvent. Things have not improved a great deal.
“More businesses have been impacted by cash flow issues, insolvency and none-paying debtors. They now see they need to do something about that – by mitigating the risk through credit practices including getting more information on potential clients at an earlier stage to assess them or by buying trade credit insurance.”
