A new Bermuda computer systems solutions company has begun a marketing drive to sell its product to reinsurers and insurers both on the Island and abroad.

ASP Ltd. was set up a year ago by Griffths and Wanklyn as a way to sell on a system they had developed for their own reinsurance offices around the world.

Willie Wanklyn and Julian Griffths, both directors of the start-up, have brought in Grenville Lines as a consultant to help market the product and say there has already been considerable interest in their new company.

"The interest has been phenomenal,'' said Mr. Lines. "We have about 20 companies and have seen about seven of them so far, and the interest is definitely there.'' The appeal of the product is that it is tailor-made by an insurance company for insurance, rather than adapting a different programme for the needs of an insurance company.

Mr. Wanklyn said the system is worked on a whole allows access on many different levels -- from the back end to the front end.

"The same system can be accessed from the agent to the reinsurance broker to the accounts and the back-end. A lot of people doing very different things can use the system,'' he said. The template for the system grew out of making Griffths and Wanklyn a paperless office in the early 1990. This led to the company overhauling the way it did business.

Parts of the company, which has offices all over the world, constantly had to rekey information into the different modules of their old system. Now with the MGA:/Net all the information flows from one part of the company to the another, and from one company to another. Files can have histories, notes, pictures of say a truck that has been in a crash and attached a recording of the driver describing the crash. Credit checks can be done on-line and it takes three minutes to download yellow pages information onto the screen.

From the browser adjustors can see the policy and claim information and manage the claim life cycle with a minimum of systems training.

"This has been in the works for 15 years,'' said Mr. Griffiths. "It is the coming to fruition of a 10 year project.'' Now they have a company that specialised in the development, supply and support of system solutions for both the insurance and reinsurance industry.

Most of the interest in Bermuda is from reinsurance companies and in the United States it is from insurance companies, Mr. Wanklyn said.

But the company believes that the system will have a great future with captives on the Island. The company said it can provide whole packages for insurance and reinsurance companies that will make the whole process more streamlined, quicker and more efficient.

And there are various levels of service offered, from "full'' an entire system and care of that system to "lite'' a smaller system for a smaller insurance office and "ASP'' for professionals who do not want to worry about running a systems department for their company.

And they are confident they have the tightest possible security for their customers, with a bunker in the United States, digital certificates, encrypted communications and digital signatures.

"This is the meat on the bone that the insurance world has been looking for in a computer system,'' said Mr. Lines. "It has blown me away, and we have been getting a very favourable reaction from the market place.''