Northern Irish siblings Joanne Cole and Desmond McGivern have developed a new Insurtech Platform , BrokerIQ, for the Insurance and mortgage broker industry.
Joanne Cole, a qualified Primary teacher, began working in the insurance industry when a local insurance broker granted her a career opportunity within his new business. It was here that Joanne fell in love with the vast opportunities the industries offered.
She was able to experience first-hand the exceptional work that brokers and their teams did for their clients. In addition to this she also saw the need for brokers to use more digital technology to utilise the data they collected from clients and ensure that sufficient customer engagement was maintained.
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Joanne realised that for insurance consumers, the process of buying insurance and understanding what they had was often difficult and unclear. Ultimately, it was Joanne’s passion for the broker industry and her prior experience of data analysis within education that prompted her to look for a solution to help brokers.
Explaining the inspiration behind BrokerIQ, Joanne said: “When I started working in the insurance industry, all I could see was data. Having come from a background of data analysis, I instantly wanted to take this data and organise it in a way that benefitted the broker and their customers. That is what BrokerIQ does- it provides brokers with a platform to communicate with their clients using different marketing tools to keep their clients engaged. For the insurance consumer, it organises all of their insurance data in one sleek mobile application.”
Combining this passion with her love of technology led Joanne to develop her own Software system for the broker market. Commenting on this, Joanne said: “I became fascinated with changes within the insurance industry- such as the new technology used. The new companies which focused on embedded insurance and usage-based technology intrigued me. I realised there was nothing digital to support the broker market.”
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Together with her brother, Desmond McGivern, a software developer who has previously worked in tech start-ups, they began building the BrokerIQ platform.
Although the idea was born well before the pandemic, the changes in society certainly exacerbated their plan to move quickly. Des moved home from London and the pair worked tirelessly to build the platform.
After receiving initial funding from TechStart NI, BrokerIQ have completed a very successful test period after being phased out over the past six months, and are now ready to launch the "BrokerIQ for Business" version for business consumers.
The BrokerIQ app is now available for download from the App Store for iPhone, or the Google Play Store for Android users.
