By Richard Farrell, Chief Innovation Officer at Netcall

Aged 332 years, the London Market isn’t new to the need to modernise. For many years, the insurance market has been cautious regarding change and technological advancement, whilst facing mounting pressure to radically transform and keep pace in the digital world. The pandemic, however, has amplified this need for change. Following a year of economic instability, London Market firms risk becoming obsolete if they do not take immediate and urgent action to modernise.

In September 2020, the London Market reported a half-year loss of £400m, compared with a £2.3bn profit in the first half of 2019, and expects to pay out around £5bn in COVID-related claims. With further turbulence and financial uncertainty ahead, the corporate body must keep its sights firmly set on cutting unnecessary costs and transforming internal processes to facilitate this.

Whilst throwing the sector into chaos, the pandemic was a true eye-opener for the Market. Relying on systems and processes built years ago, which were centred around people doing business in a City office, left the London Market at a crossroads and facing once-in-a-lifetime challenges and opportunities. Lockdown created an urgent need for new systems to support a new hybrid workforce, and within this need now lies the opportunity for London Market firms to rejuvenate – building greater efficiency into systems and processes to enable agility and future growth, as well as long-term digital ways of meeting and working. Intelligent automation technologies such as low-code platforms, when combined with robotic process automation (RPA) and powered by artificial intelligence (AI), will be pivotal to this transformation. With these platforms, London Market business users can collaborate and build new applications with IT teams without the need for costly and time-consuming traditional coding methods.

As a result of redesigning processes, London Market businesses can identify where efficiencies can be made and then rapidly develop optimised systems that keep both technology and people at their core. This will be crucial to achieving significant long-term cost savings and maintaining the London Market’s current position on an international level.

Using 2020 challenges as inspiration to evolve

The last year has seen a range of hurdles for both the London Market and individual businesses: a shift to remote working, the need to optimise costs, and the imperative to maintain status in the global order. These have not been easy, and these challenges are likely only the start of greater change that we will see in the coming months and years.

Businesses have proven in the last 12 months that they can adapt and shift when needed with the Blueprint plan, Lloyd’s of London’s ambitious plan to create the world’s most advanced insurance marketplace. Blueprint Two, which was released in November 2020 and built on March’s Blueprint One, established new ways of doing business, underpinned by the need for digital channels that enable advanced data collection and management. The right tech and tools can enable brokers, insurers and partners with delegated authorities to operate at a materially lower cost, estimated to be at least £800m as part of this evolution.

As John Neal, Lloyd’s of London CEO, states, the London Market needs to make itself ‘more relevant, more innovative and much more cost-effective’. Solutions that enable rapid digital transformation, whilst boosting efficiency and lowering costs, will be crucial to achieving this goal.

Future-proofing the London Market 

Due to its ease-of-use, low-code platforms can empower London Market teams to collaborate to build new applications in the fastest way possible and speed through application backlogs. Rather than taking a rip-and-replace approach to innovation, the technology can enable London Market organisations to stitch legacy systems together with new applications – effectively building upon existing investments to provide a better user and customer experience.

With the right technologies, the London Market can rapidly reduce inefficiencies by automating manual or broken processes, whilst also integrating with a number of different systems. This will enable organisations to provide a central platform that can give visibility across all parties – and in turn enable better decision-making through richer data and the use of AI.

Perhaps one of the more pressing London Market processes brought into the limelight during the pandemic has been the process of claims management – which intelligent automation solutions can help with too. With so many stakeholders involved, managing the claims lifecycle can be extremely complex, and the sheer number of claims being processed means that teams face huge pressure to provide swift service, and to keep claims pipelines moving. By consolidating data and processes under one platform, the lifecycle management can be improved to provide real-time information relating to a company’s claims exposures, including aggregates, and other elements such as supplier management. Greater visibility of these elements will, in turn, drive greater sector efficiencies.

Reshaping the London Market once and for all

The next few months will bring myriad challenges and opportunities around reshaping how London Market businesses work and trade for the benefit of its clients and people. There are considerations for all organisations, including new ways of employee and trading partner engagement. A one-size-fits-all strategy simply won’t work in such a complex environment, but using the right software can unlock business benefits and growth potential for London Market firms large and small.

Fundamentally, London Market firms must invest in and prioritise the technologies that will enable their workforce to save time and drive value back to the organisation – as well as work how they want to work. Whilst the social nature of the London Market, which is largely based on personal networks, indicates a strong return to office work when lockdown restrictions are lifted, there is still likely to be some level of remote working moving forward.

Flexible and agile intelligent automation technologies can empower the London Market to join data together across numerous back-end systems to provide an easy-to-use workflow across complex process requirements. By enabling employees to make better-informed underwriting and claims decisions, based on better access to enriched information, organisations can not only drive greater efficiencies, but keep up with the demands of a digital-first future.