Insurance technology company SSP says systems used by New Zealand brokers are back in operation after its cloud-based transaction platform went down last month, but businesses are still experiencing problems accessing documents.

“We have all our affected New Zealand-hosted customers live with their systems and operating again,” New Zealand Manager Samuel Finkle told insuranceNEWS.com.au.

Rosser Underwriting MD Andrew McFetridge says the issues are mostly resolved but problems remain with accessing documents and data files, and his company is dealing with a backlog of work.

“We are totally dissatisfied with the way it went down at a busy time for us at the end of the month, and the prolonged nature of it was counterproductive,” he told insuranceNEWS.com.au.

The company is calculating the cost of the outage and expects to receive compensation from SSP.

“We will just see what their compensation approach is and weigh it up from there,” he said.

Mr Finkle says SSP has never experienced a similar incident. More than 20 brokers in New Zealand were affected by the recent problem.

“We have two recently equipped Tier 3 data centres, which are designed to eliminate this sort of event occurring,” he said. “All affected New Zealand-hosted customers are within one of these centres.”

The impact was greater in the UK, where more than 40% of brokers are understood to have been affected. The failure followed a power cut at a data centre in England.

SSP CEO Laurence Walker last week informed clients the company will be working on the restoration for a number of weeks, according to UK industry media.

Bristol-based Hayes Parsons MD James Woollam, in an open letter published last Wednesday, said SSP assurances that 90% of brokers were “back on their systems” or going through testing were “disingenuous”.

“We have been given limited usability, with still no access to our email archive, client files or hard drive,” he said. “We are still working with at least one hand behind our back.”

The British Insurance Brokers Association (BIBA) says it will host a meeting between senior SSP personnel and some broker members to reach agreement on the next steps.

“As the trade body of many affected brokers it is essential that we take the lead in navigating these issues and addressing the long-term solutions on their behalf,” BIBA CEO Steve White said.

“Once the current problems have subsided we feel it is also important for all of our members that we ascertain the robustness of the systems, risk management and disaster recovery of the other leading broker software houses, and this is already on our agenda.”