DOES size really matter when it comes to doing the business? I felt a recent national debate in the insurance sector hit the spot when it said a ‘fresh and innovative approach’ rewards collaborative and flexible firms, but not perhaps in the way that was intended. The implication from some quarters is clearly ‘small firms good; big firms bad’ when it comes to such laudable attributes as collaboration and flexibility; which brings us to the old chestnut – does size matter?

It’s one of those well-worn arguments and it’s not surprising loss adjusters should have clashed over suggestions that the size of their business affects their ability to collaborate and deliver a bespoke service and individualised customer journey. As a director of Aquarium Software, a successful small business, you might expect me to agree that small is beautiful, but the truth is, it’s never that simple.

Major insurers such as RSA in Canada and in the UK, Assurant and Markerstudy have chosen Aquarium’s ‘boutique’ offering over the ‘big boys’, so clearly size isn’t everything, but, it’s all about perception. In one respect, size really does matter; not in terms of a supplier’s physical or financial size – but in the scalability of its offering in the event volumes do grow.

A niche technology company like ours is just as likely to be able to develop a genuinely scaleable platform as a larger provider; yet paradoxically, this scaleable approach can be applied to all sizes of customer, provided they have ambitions to grow.

Clients’ customers can benefit from a truly personalised customer journey. The claim that big business cannot do this is no longer true. ‘Big enough to deliver, small enough to care’ has effectively been replaced with ‘must deliver, must care….whatever the size.’

Mark Colonnese, Director, Aquarium Software Hale, Cheshire