After listening all morning to insurers and reinsurers talk about the state of their business, Bermuda-based consultant James Martin came to the conclusion that the sector is going to have to get on the technology bandwagon.

"Over the next few years you are going to see extremely fast change and you are obviously not ready for it,'' he told delegates at the World Insurance Forum during a lunchtime speech.

Mr. Martin said an increasing amount of bandwidth through the use of fibre-optics and computer power -- what he calls alien intelligence -- is changing the way global corporations are doing business. Better computer power and high speed communications technologies are allowing companies to respond quickly to customer needs, endlessly varying products and distribution according to demand.

Those companies that can respond faster to demand are going to get to the top.

He found in his consulting work with insurance companies that many deals could have been better done electronically. For example his company James Martin and Co. was able to increase business at Sun Life of Canada by 90 percent in one month. The company was able to cut the time it took to produce a policy from 30 days to 90 minutes.

In another consulting job he found that in the brokers deals were mainly being done through a paper process rather then electronically. Only one percent of the deals were being done electronically. That meant critical market information about the business was not being transmitted through the organisation.

"Insurance industry and especially broker systems have not spent the money on intellect and on technology systems,'' he said.

Change is coming through the Internet and an increasingly sophisticated consumer is going to bypass the traditional broker middleman and buy direct.

The process is happening in the travel industry and it's going to happen in other industries, including insurance.

"In the insurance industry a tsunami of change is coming,'' he said. "You can see it on the horizon. You can argue how fast it's coming but enormous change is coming because of technology.'' Mr. Martin heads international consultancy James Martin and Co. and is the author of 100 books, including Cybercorp. He is currently working on a book called Alien Intelligence in which he describes the difference between human intelligence and computer intelligence.

Mr. Martin believes the strategic use of all the technology at a company's disposal will determine the eventual winners in the race to survive. He calls such a progressive organisation the "cybercorp'', one that's responsive to change through the efficient use of technology.

BUSINESS BUC