Page 132 - Be Reasonable – Do It My Way , Peter E. Daly AM, My Story

CHAPTER 12 – AEGIS INSURANCE CO LTD
previously at Norwich Union was allocated all the L&G managers in head office services and I got all the Norwich managers at the branches.
When it came to the practical side of merging the business every one of us, from the General Manager down, worked on building the files up-to-date and to a common standard and doing the computer input. Unfortunately, the merging of the computer systems was not so successful as the computer manager who was a Norwich Union person decided on a big bang approach and every L&G policy, claim, agent record, accounting transaction etcetera was loaded onto hard paper input forms and then data processed into the computer system.
It all went live on the same day, without a trial. Alan Mason, who ultimately inherited the mess to sort out, tells me that there were 80,000 rejected transactions on the first day out of 100,000 policies approximately. Each day thereafter new input got rejected until the original records were corrected. Because of this the company did not have a reliable general ledger for nearly three years. This was Brian de Kock’s nightmare. Brian was the Chief Accountant.
On the other hand, the front end of the business was performing fantastically well. Free from our Life parents we set about developing Broker relationships and Broker business; both commercial and industrial as well as personal lines, where Brokers then still had a major share of the market. We also had our own special relationships like General Mining, Eastern Province Building Society, and the Hoffman and Glazer accounts.
Underwriting the Hoffman and Glazer accounts was unusual. The premium was always last year’s claims plus 20% plus CPI. Claims staff were under instruction not to reject claims for obvious reasons. One claim that was difficult was when Bennie Glazer put in a bill for cleaning all the pigeon droppings off one of his buildings!
Status was very important at Aegis and there were several clear status symbols that people aspired to. The first was to be included in the Monday morning executive meetings in the board room.
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