Farewell to our long-standing leavers, Jim Peiffer and Diane Battis, and welcome to our new colleagues!

We’d like to congratulate Jim Peiffer on his retirement from Bell & Clements, after a long career in this industry, including 13 years with us!  Jim will be retiring as Manager of Software Engineering on 30th September 2022.

Jim has been pivotal in building the Bridge Platform’s real-time data delivery capabilities and data warehouse used by our clients and inhouse teams for data analytics and KPI monitoring. 

We wish Jim a long and happy retirement - he will be missed by all at Bell & Clements and many of our clients who have a close working relationship with him.

He’s being replaced by Gundeep Singh, who started Wednesday 14th September as Manager of Software Engineering. Gundeep will take over Jim’s responsibilities and will be based in the Bell & Clements London office, reporting to the Chief Innovation Officer, Bharat Mepani.

Gundeep bring more than 20 years’ experience in software development and delivery of application software for multinational clients, most recently in the Fintech sector.

Please also join us in congratulating Diane Battis on her retirement from Bell & Clements.  Diane has had a long career in insurance, including 13 years with Bell & Clements. Diane retired as Policy Applications Administrator on 2nd September 2022.

Diane was instrumental in our Docucorp library data collection efforts.  She was involved in creating, distributing, and supporting libraries of policy forms and dec pages for every line of business we sell.  She worked with many of our clients in rolling out and supporting contracts which use our Docucorp libraries.

Diane’s replacement is Vera Ligon who joined Bell & Clements Inc on 12th September 2022 as Policy Applications Administrator and will take over all Docucorp responsibilities.  Vera brings more than 25 years of insurance experience on the carrier and coverholder sides of the business.   She’ll report to the Senior Vice President of Operations, Carmel Vindivich.

Bridge to Cloud

At Bell & Clements we’re always looking to improve our service and the way we conduct our dealings. We’re now seeking to smarten up the way we integrate with our coverholders and Third Party Administrators (TPAs).

We currently use a system called “The Bridge”.  This is the pivotal core of Bell & Clements’ mission critical in-house developed technology platform.  It allows coverholders to engage with Bell & Clements for binding authority contracts. The Bridge also acts as a portal for authorised coverholders to engage with us but also as a conduit through which coverholders and TPA’s can integrate with Bell & Clements, and exchange structured data for ingestion and subsequent reporting. 

The overwhelming majority (approximately 80%) of the interfaces between C&C’s approved coverholders’ own systems and the Bridge take place in real-time. The supplied data typically contains a significant level of information on each individual coverholder’s bound policies with associated premium, exposure and claims information. The Bridge Interaction Layer provides SOAP (XML/DocuCorp) and REST (JSON) API’s and is capable of importing Excel bordereaux files e-mailed to Bell & Clements by coverholders.

We will be moving the entire Bridge Platform over to Munich Re’s Microsoft Azure One Cloud Platform. This will offer greater resilience, combined with scalability to grow the platform as our business grows.

This major project is broken into two distinct stages: discovery and implementation, we will be starting the discovery process with a consultancy vendor in October 2022. We will keep you updated on our progress!