Mr. Michael Blaney:

To give some background on Autoline Insurance Group, we started life as a small business more than 40 years ago in 1975 selling mainly personal lines insurance in Newry, which was at the time in the full throes of the Troubles. We gradually managed to grow the business against the odds and we diversified into commercial insurance and financial services. Challenges in the insurance market during the Troubles, specifically in our region, meant that it was much more difficult to attract insurers into the market, with fringe companies withdrawing completely and only the large corporates remaining. That had an impact on the level of premiums and pricing. Insurer visits on the ground were few and far between and insurance premiums for clients were extremely high.

I acquired control of the company in 1997 and began to work through our vision of growing the company to its full potential. One of the challenges prior to this current era was the attraction of talented employees to Newry and the Border area in general. Over the past ten years, we have grown from 50 employees to almost 200. Turnover has grown from £11 million to just less than £50 million. In 2007 and 2008, we acquired five additional brokerages across Northern Ireland, which expanded our geographical reach across all the main regions. Three years ago we opened a greenfield site in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, which is also affected by its close proximity to the Border.

We have a reputation in the market for innovation in both products and talent management. We secured the gold accreditation from Investors in People in 2012 and have positioned ourselves as an employer of choice to attract the right talent from all over Ireland, North and South of the Border. We have twice won the Irish Newsinnovative employer of the year and, for each of the past two years, we have won insurance industry awards for UK broker innovation of the year. In November 2014, we secured financial assistance of £500,000 from Invest NI towards the employment creation of 60 new jobs related to our young driver telematics product, which has been exported to Britain and the Republic of Ireland. Recently, Invest NI has pledged a skills growth programme grant of a further £285,000 for training and development of staff related to that project.

Also in 2014, we commenced a knowledge transfer partnership with Queen's University, Belfast, through which we recruited a Vietnamese data scientist to work inhouse on our telematics data for two years. He earned his first-class masters degree in data science from the UCD Smurfit Business School and was part of a well-established community in Dublin. Coming North to work for us was not a huge move for him. However, he was unfortunately the first casualty of Brexit. Having previously agreed to remain with us after the end of his knowledge transfer partnership, as soon as the leave vote won UK referendum, he made plans to look for employment in Dublin as he felt it was important to remain within the EU.

One of our significant market opportunities is to grow into the Republic of Ireland market, particularly with our young driver product. I know that insurance and its rising cost in the Republic of Ireland market has been a very topical point here. As such, it is a strategic development market for us, especially for our innovative ChilliDrive app, which paves the way to offer affordable insurance to consumers. A key expansion opportunity for us would be to set up an operation South of the Border to allow us to offer our ChilliDrive driver coaching app to young drivers in the South and to allow us to benefit from the rich talent pool in new areas of research and technology.

One of our major concerns is how the flow of talent will be affected by markets across the Border. A significant portion of our agri-business growth strategy was the natural step into the Republic, given that two of our offices, Newry and Enniskillen, are so close to the South. This will inevitably become more difficult from a regulatory perspective if there is a hard Brexit, with the possibility of the passport rights we currently enjoy to trade in other EU jurisdictions being withdrawn. We may also be inadvertently affected by our insurer partners' passport rights being similarly affected. A key element of our business development plan is to acquire brokerages in the South. All in all, despite the natural organic growth potential for expanding into what is already a market we trade in, any impediment to doing business in the South will inevitably adversely affect our growth strategy or, at the very least, slow us down significantly.