A Kiwi Pure Broking user affected by August’s
SSP system outage is still suffering continued negative effects with regards to access to historical data.
Murray Rosser of
Rosser Underwriting said: “This has had a negative effect on our ability to properly handle renewals and has caused significant ongoing additional stress to our underwriting staff.
“Over the last few working days all users have encountered some system errors in the production of new documents.”
Rosser said the particular error had now been eliminated and they were now able to produce the documents but it all added to the delays and subsequent frustration.
He said they had just about caught up on the backlog of processing, however their planned restructure of certain activities had had to be postponed until later this month or November.
Dr Ram Vashist, of Aim Associates, said they were managing to clear their backlog of processing but it had entailed working double the number of hours than normal and caused inconvenience to customers.
“Hopefully by the end of October we will be able to catch up, if all goes smoothly,” he told
Insurance Business.
However, he said: “The software is still slow and hangs up. This may be due to remote access or full restoration of the data.”
Vashist said there had been a joint request by affected Pure Broking users to have a collective meeting with SSP by the end of October to discuss ‘facts, figures and the future’.
“They (SSP) are currently focusing on the restoration of data and the smooth running of the software.
“But a joint meeting is important to discuss compensation through SSP liability, the improvement of SSP software to current market pace, and safe, secured storage on at least two servers in the future.”
Rosser added: “We have not had any definitive compensation offer from SSP and the momentum for a user group approach to them is growing.
“Certainly it is most important that SSP put their energies into getting the system working properly and all data available, but users’ patience over the matter of compensation is not going to last too much longer.
“Without some worthwhile communication from SSP on this matter I anticipate some action to get users together commencing this month.”
Samuel Finkle, SSP NZ manager, told
Insurance Business the system was now restored but there was still work to do to complete historical document storage elements.
"Our top priority has been on restoring service," he said. "We’re already setting up meetings with all of the firms affected by the outage to review the level of disruption to their business and consider how else SSP can help to mitigate the impact.
"All of our customers are important to us, and the geographic location of the customer has not been a consideration in the prioritisation for restoring service. We are planning to migrate NZ broking customers to 'in region' hosted infrastructure at a hosting partner that we have used for some of our other services. This approach will enable us to provide a more localised service and reduce the time zone challenges. Work had already started on the migration before the outage, and we plan to complete as soon as possible, once our customers’ operations are back to normal. In terms of preventing a repeat, we will be working with our customers on business continuity planning to meet their needs."
Related stories:
SSP outage: brokers consider compo claim
SSP outage: mixed reaction after system restored
SSP outage: brokers still waiting
