Over the past few weeks, we’ve had a number of conversations with ‘industry spokespeople’ discussing the impact of RDR on the B2B portals and also how they interact with some of the solutions’ providers.
If we cast our minds back to the early development of the portal, one of the driving motivations of services like Exweb – even the Windows’ based Common Trading Platform (CTP) before it – was to ‘own’ the desktop. The mantra was that the service should be universal and that the portal should be exactly that, the primary route from intermediary to product provider and back.
Now, for a variety of reasons (some technological and some political) that never really happened – the commercial grip on the electronic distribution space by The Exchange was dissipated by the industry’s creation of Assureweb and Webline’s march from niche to mainstream. In many ways, the portals’ influence in the value chain was weakened and the focus was more on new business activity than the complete end-to-end cycle.
In the meantime, the creation and adoption of Origo’s XML messaging standards created a technical environment that significantly lowered the barrier to entry for other players to develop services and solutions in the electronic space – hence the development of offerings like True Potential.
What we are seeing now, is a realignment of the portals’ role and a good example is one that is provided by Assureweb. They have developed a robust machine to machine interface, APE (Assureweb Powered eBusiness) that drives significant volumes of illustration traffic through their infrastructure. APE and its equivalant in other providers such as Exweb and Webline, allows for a uniform user experience via their point-of-sale solution of choice, without presenting the native portal screens and validation control – this ‘black boxing’ is starting to overtake the traditional quotations’ mechanisms and indeed Assureweb now state that higher volumes are driven through APE than their web interface.
Now, I mentioned Origo standards earlier – this is where, I think, things get interesting – with the development of distributor specific offerings, like True Potential etc., there is an increasing opportunity/temptation for solutions’ providers to consider building their own links direct to the product providers – on the face of it, if you are firm where you want to actively control the entire end-to-end process and perhaps have limited panels, then the lure of ‘DIY’ is compelling. However, there are a number of ‘gotchas’.
Standards
There is a wide variation in the adoption of Origo standards by providers – you might think you can build something once and use it many times, but in reality each provider implementation will be different;
Volume
If you are successful, you’re going to have to ensure you can cope with the volume of traffic and usage – that’s not cheap;
Change
We all know that in this industry things just don’t stay the same – whatever you build, you’re going to have to maintain, update and upgrade it -you might need to change the product providers as you re-assess your panel(s) – your solution will have to stand the test of time.
So despite the promise of the software houses building direct links, because it’s ‘easy’, there are some areas where the portals can excel – they’ve been doing it for some considerable time and understand the vagaries of building complex and robust transactional systems. One major network, decided to use a portal rather than build it themselves precisely for the reason of not re-inventing the wheel, but more important, being able to switch providers with relative ease. It is especially true where the type of transaction moves from new business to other classes such as contract enquiry, commission and new business tracking.
So where does this leave us post RDR? Well, certainly the march of the messaging hub will continue a-pace – you will see the diminution (or even the demise) of the portal web service. With differing advice models, remuneration differentials and other product pricing factors, the ability to acquire information and data easily and effectively from the provider of choice will be vital – why build it yourself – use a portal.
