A small group of Kiwi insurance brokers who suffered from a three-week long
SSP outage may band together to seek compensation, it has been reported.
Some 21 Kiwi brokers were inconvenienced in varying degrees when a power cut knocked out SSP’s Solihull data centre in the UK,
Fairfax Media said.
In a statement issued last week, SSP said it had successfully restored core services to affected Kiwi brokers, but are still in the process of restoring document archives and some non-transactional data.
Sam Finkle, SSP’s NZ manager, said the company was deeply regretful of the outage’s impact to customers, and said it would work closely with them to restore their operations as soon as possible.
Finkle said SSP would investigate the cause of the glitch, and data for all affected customers in the UK and New Zealand was being restored to a more resilient storage centre in London,
Fairfax Media reported. He did not comment on whether the company had received compensation claims.
Murray Rosser of
Rosser Underwriting, who said the outage cost them $40,000 in lost staff time, told
Fairfax Media that he had spoken to three to four other affected brokers about joining together to seek compensation from SSP: "The thinking is if we do it on a collective basis, we may have more traction than individually."
Rosser also said the inability to extract data for bespoke reports had compromised a large UK deal: "If that falls over that's going to be potentially more costly than any of the costs we have incurred to date for extra work we have had to do.”
Rosser said they still have problems accessing stored historical data, and SSP had been unable to inform them when it would be restored: "It complicates our work quite significantly and it means we can't access our scanned paper records. In the long term, it's an impossible situation; in the short term, we can get by because our customers are understanding."
Tauranga Keith Penny, TLC Insurance CEO, said the system outage caused his company a back log of work, and was also considering a compensation claim,
Fairfax Media reported.
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