The 330-year-old insurance market Lloyd’s of London has secured £300 million to fund a digital transformation overhaul to cut its costs and streamline its processes.
A major part of this overhaul, dubbed Blueprint One, will involve the creation of new digital platforms.
A “digital end-to-end platform” will be used to create a portal and a suite of services for handling complex risks in the insurance and reinsurance market, with the goal of supplementing face-to-face negotiations.
APIs will also be used to help connect the platform to insurance brokers’ own systems, while centralised tools such as a tax calculator and compliance checker will help simplify processes. The platform will be supported with information taken from a common data platform.
A digital Lloyd's risk exchange will also be created for handling less complex risk agreements at high volumes, allowing for brokers to easily create and purchase policies, while also accessing Lloyd’s products and services. To speed up the placement of risks and reduce their costs, algorithms will automatically rate the risks. Again, a centralised tax calculator, compliance checker, and data platform will help ensure risks are created effectively and above board.
“The risk exchange will build on the market’s current investment in e-trading platforms and other technologies to digitise the placement of less complex risks. It will not replace these systems, but will integrate them so they are compatible,” explained the Blueprint One document. “This will benefit market participants by giving them access to a wider customer base, enabling them to leverage the Lloyd’s brand, its global distribution network, economies of scale and lower costs.”
A suite of other proposed changes, which will be funded by debt rather than charges made on the market’s members, come in response to poor performance and complaints around the high cost of doing business with Lloyd’s of London.
As such, the digital transformation process, which will enter its first phase next year, is not just a way for Lloyd’s of London to improve internally but to also help bolster its insurance market.
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“This first Future at Lloyd’s blueprint marks an exciting new chapter for Lloyd’s. It sets out how we are going to combine data, technology and new ways of working with our existing strengths to transform the culture we work in and everything we do – from placing risks and paying claims to attracting capital and developing new products,” said Lloyd's of London’s CEO John Neal.
This is yet another example of a long-established organisation undergoing a digital transformation doctrine. But such projects vary in scale, with Lloyd’s of London’s Blueprint One being a major undertaking, while other projects can be of a smaller scale, such as the Department for Transport’s goal to create a digital transport data mapping tool.
Some projects can be rather different altogether, such as Massachusetts Police’s use of Boston Dynamic robot dogs to sniff out bombs and explore hazardous areas.
Yet regardless of size and scope, there’s a healthy appetite for digital transformation in all manner of organisations and industries, with the goal of taking the latest technology and using it to streamline or redefine how an organisation operates.
