and four to six years behind the United States in electronic messaging-companies or individuals communicating electronically from computer to computer.

The technology is vital as a replacement in the future for facsimile transmissions in a changing, competitive, responsive and more environmentally conscious business climate.

This emerged from a seminar, sponsored by the Bermuda Insurance Institute at the Hamilton Princess.

Electronic mail, or E-mail will soon provide opportunities for communication and information access at a superior level to the telephone or the fax, especially for business purposes. That's why local companies are lining up to provide such services. E-mail will move out of the vein of just in-office communication to inter-office links.

It will give Bermuda's international business sector, and local companies, a communications tool that, at present, does not exist here as it does in major US and UK markets. A universal, local E-mail service has already been identified by the BII as the most immediate and pressing requirement of the industry, with the service becoming available internationally.

The absence of the technology was so disturbing that last year, the Bermuda Insurance Institute set about identifying the problem areas in an effort to not only get Bermuda's information-flow options on par with major business centres, but to also allow Bermuda to become a better and more cost effective place to do business, when compared with other domiciles. "It is useful to send messages across the office or across the world,'' says Martin Gutteridge of KPMG Peat Marwick. " We have to react and get competitive. We need to have a situation where a lawyer in the UK can ask a message in the Bermuda market and have an answer at his desk within 15 minutes.'' A related, but even higher level of information exchange called electronic data interchange (EDI), is needed for business purposes, such as insurance companies. It will provide an access to a database without the previous prohibitive expense. It will be cheaper and faster to get information, and will mean more work can be accomplished from home because of E-mail.

And the fax machine could already be a thing of the past by the turn of the century. The chairman of the Information Technology Committee of BII, Christopher Worsfold, of Kempe and Whittle says: "E-mail is more environmentally friendly. You wouldn't need reams and reams of expensive paper, especially for those large reports. And, in other ways, it will be much cheaper. And, when more than one person has to see the information, E-mail's sharing possibilities are far greater than a fax machine.

Christopher J. Worsfold.