Customers and brokers around the world now have 24/7 access to the Bermuda market through a unique online directory that carries information on all its companies and its products.

The Bermuda-insurance.org site, which will officially be launched at RIMS in Hawaii this month, currently features summary information on some 250 Bermuda-based companies including insurance brokers, captive managers, insurers and reinsurers and rent-a-captive facilities providers.

The easy-to-navigate site is designed to provide clients around the world who are looking for insurance and reinsurance capacity immediate information on the market. Visitors can among other things search the site by coverage or company, find Bermuda publications, information on the Bermuda regulatory market or details on how to form an insurance company or captive. The site also lists conferences on island and off island that Bermuda will be at and has live industry news from PR Newswire.

Insurance development council member Alan Waring, who is president of Crump International Ltd and chairman of Bermuda market solutions and website committee, spearheaded the project.

Since it is a database driven site it actually pushes the maintenance of information on the website down to all of the individual companies. Each company has its own password which enables it to get information on a product range anytime they want. At the beginning of each year, the IDC will also be able to pull the information to update its Bermuda Market Solutions promotional brochure in time for RIMS.

"We have created something that is completely unique in the world. No other insurance market has online a full directory of all its companies and all of its products and we can add new products and companies at the drop of the hat because of the sophistication of the database built around the back," said Mr. Waring.

The database took some ten months to design and build which is likely one reason why no other market has embarked on such a task. Mr. Waring passed his vision of what he wanted the site to do to Bror Muller, senior consultant of Bespoke Software, who turned it into a technical possibility.

After spending 11 years working here, nine of which were with Arthur J. Gallagher before he started Crump International, Mr. Waring said his knowledge of the market also helped tremendously in creating the site since he had a broad spectrum and understanding of what the market is, what different companies are doing and then how to categorise the market. "We haven't got it perfect. It is always going to be a work in progress because we're in a very dynamic market so the key was to build a database system that will be flexible enough to cope with a dynamic changing evolving marketplace and that is what we believe we have successfully done."

But perhaps the main reason Bermuda has been able to succeed at producing such a site where others have not is because of its cohesiveness.

"Bermuda really is a very close and cohesive marketplace. We are all competitors but what we recognise mainly is that as a marketplace we are competing with other markets and it is a big world out there. If the Bermuda market can make headway and get ahead of the pack then we will all benefit whereas if you look at many other marketplaces they are less of a tight cohesive market," Mr. Waring said.

The IDC has also obtained various domain names and is looking to obtain others with a goal of making Bermuda one of the top hits on search engines when people search for insurance and reinsurance.

"We want the Bermuda website to be up there on the top and each of these domain names point to the one place," he said.

The site will also eventually include information on all of the elements of the marketplace ? law firms, accounting firms and other service providers ? who provide service to customers around the world.

"The goal is really to put people in position where if they want to do business with Bermuda and haven't done it before they can go to the website and get hold of a range of contacts and names of service providers and easily then access them because our brokers and captive managers, lawyers and accountants are the main contact to most of outside world," said Mr. Waring.