ID Podcast: The promise of a digital London market: LMA’s Sheila Cameron and Joe Brace
New tools including AI will help underwriters assess a greater number of risks in detail, the LMA’s chief executive and operations director say
Digitalisation will enhance the existing best practice of top brokers and carriers, Sheila Cameron and Joe Brace tell the Insurance Day Podcast
Hands-free processing of underwriting data is the future of a digital Lloyd’s market, the chief executive of the Lloyd’s Market Association (LMA) said.
Speaking to the Insurance Day Podcast, Sheila Cameron said the promise of Blueprint Two and efforts to develop data standards would be a market where data flowed “freely to counterparties and to the back office without touching the sides”.
In the future risks could be auto-matched to particular markets, with a core data record that could be automatically reconciled financially “without having to touch any hands”, Cameron said.
“Once that decision has been made by the underwriter, the data should be able to flow to the counterparties and to the back office without touching the sides.”
This was echoed by Joe Brace, operations director at the LMA, who said digital markets would help to accentuate the existing best practices of top brokers and carriers.
New tools including artificial intelligence (AI) would help underwriters assess a greater number of risks in detail, something carriers only have the capacity to do with the most difficult risks at present.
“If you’ve got a small to medium enterprise, [such as] a restaurant, [AI] will read the menu and read the reviews and look at TripAdvisor and tell you [if you] might get some claims against food poisoning,” Brace said.
He continued: “That’s what the good underwriters are doing already. But it will do it thousands of times, not just on the two or three risks you’ve cherry picked.”
Comparing these new technologies to the introduction of the internet, Brace said they would empower best practice across the market.
“We all thought [the internet] would reinvent everything. It did, but it empowered the existing behaviours and existing good traits [in the market] and everything here is built on trust and the relationships and looking after that end customer.”
