Hastings Insurance Services, one of the UK's fastest growing providers of vehicle and home insurance policies, has today announced the successful migration of its IT integration services to Kewill's hosted solution, MessageBroker. The migration will enable Hastings to easily handle larger volumes of data, scale for future growth and make real-time updates as business conditions change. MessageBroker also allows employees to focus more time and resource on core business competencies and customer service.

With extensive growth over the last few years, and aggressive future growth plans, Hastings decided to move from its existing client side solution to Kewill's hosted integration solution. Kewill MessageBroker is a fully managed integration service which cuts out the complexity and cost of best practice B2B integration.

Today, the company processes over 1m policies via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) every year. Scaling a client-side system up from this level could have been problematic, not to mention a major business expense. Kewill's MessageBroker emerged as the obvious replacement as a hosted EDI integration solution.

Hastings began its partnership with Kewill over 10 years ago when they needed to integrate data with their back office systems. MessageBroker now collates all of the data, converts and transforms it into the correct data format, which is then loaded back into their back office in the desired format. This reduces internal time and resource, as well as improves the level of data accuracy held in its back office.

James Fairhurst, Chief Information Officer, Hastings Insurance Services: "With our extensive growth plans and vision we are looking to triple the number of individuals we insure to three million people by the year 2020. With the help of Kewill's MessageBroker we can focus our resources on more value added activities, which ultimately lead to an improved service and proposition for our customers."

Not only will MessageBroker scale to meet Hastings' aggressive growth plans and cope with any volume fluctuations, but the internal barrier of expenditure when purchasing and maintaining expensive hardware and software is removed. Kewill manages all aspects of the service on Hastings' behalf, ensuring that the system operates on or above the agreed Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Fairhurst continued: "We have received great support from Kewill over the years and we have built a partnership with them, which has contributed to the robustness of the platforms we operate. We look forward to working with Kewill on this new initiative."

Evan Puzey, Chief Marketing Officer at Kewill, said, "Hastings Insurance Services were putting a large amount of data through the system, so the ability to scale up the solution as and when they needed was immensely advantageous. MessageBroker allows Hastings to change its requirements as the company evolves, providing a flexible, scalable infrastructure, as well as expert knowledge now and into the future."


About Hastings

Hastings is one of the UK's fastest growing insurance brokers employing 1,500 people. We are a multi-award winning company which has built our business by championing the consumer and helping to hold down the cost of quality insurance. We offer car, motorcycle, van, household and pet insurance direct to the public and through our growing affinity partnerships with many UK and global leading brands.

We employ the very latest anti fraud technology to protect our customers and have driven a seven-fold increase in the amount of fraud detected since February 2009.

Hastings Direct is the trading name of Hastings Insurance Services Limited.

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