Beyond Blueprint Two

What comes next for London Market modernisation?

When Lloyd’s confirmed that Blueprint Two would not proceed as a standalone programme, it brought to a close one of the most ambitious and expensive attempts at market-wide transformation in the London Market’s history.

Blueprint Two influenced technology planning across much of the London Market throughout the 2020s. Carriers, brokers, technology vendors and market bodies invested a huge amount of time, effort and resources preparing for a future market architecture much of which now appears unlikely to come about as originally envisaged.

The operational challenges Blueprint Two set out to address remain largely unchanged. The market still faces pressure to improve data quality, reduce friction, automate routine processes, improve connectivity and remain competitive in an era of increasingly digital global markets.

Meanwhile, the environment in which those challenges need to be addressed looks very different from the one we faced when Blueprint Two was first conceived. Cloud-native platforms have matured. API-based integration has become increasingly commonplace. Artificial intelligence has moved from theory to practical deployment. Market participants are becoming accustomed to solving problems collaboratively and incrementally – rather than waiting for large-scale transformation programmes to deliver change on their behalf.

Blueprint Two may no longer provide the organised framework for modernisation, but modernisation must continue. So, what survives from Blueprint Two? What lessons have been learned? What foundations are needed next? And how might emerging technologies reshape the path forward?

To explore those questions, we asked four DOCOsoft subject matter experts for their perspectives on what lies ahead.

Darren Woolley, Account Manager

Standards, confidence and clarity matter more than ever

While it’s tempting to see Blueprint Two as a single initiative, in reality it brought together multiple strands of work, some of which will keep moving forward, regardless of what happens to the broader programme.

The Common Data Record is an obvious example. My impression from discussions across the market is that work on common data standards may be further advanced than many people realise. A significant amount of effort has continued behind the scenes through working groups and collaboration between market participants. That work may ultimately prove to be one of the more productive carryovers from the Blueprint Two era.

The Common Data Record was originally intended to define a consistent set of information captured once and then reused throughout the insurance lifecycle. That may not sound particularly exciting, but, if the market can improve data quality at source, many downstream processes become much easier. Automation becomes easier. Claims handling becomes easier. Settlement becomes easier. Reporting becomes easier.Ultimately, good data underpins everything else. That’s why it’s important to distinguish between transformation programmes and transformation itself. Programmes may evolve. Priorities may change. Branding may disappear. But the need for standards, data quality and operational improvement never goes away.

I’m also seeing carriers focus more and more on pursuing projects whose outcomes they can influence directly. Where progress depends on central delivery, confidence can easily be undermined. Where organisations take action for and among themselves, momentum is easier to maintain. That’s not to imply any sense of opposition to market-wide initiatives. It simply reflects commercial organisations’ natural tendency to focus on activities they can directly influence and control.

We have also seen many organisations delaying technology-related investment decisions while they waited to understand how Blueprint Two would influence future market architecture. That was entirely understandable. Nobody wants to invest heavily in capabilities that may later need to be redesigned. But, with Blueprint Two paused, carriers no longer need to hesitate before investing in better claims platforms, automation, analytics, AI capabilities or integration strategies.

The Blueprint Two story has clearly underlined the importance of maintaining trust and confidence. Future transformation initiatives will need to demonstrate not only technical credibility but also a clear path to delivery. Organisations need to have confidence that the time, effort and resources they are investing will translate into tangible outcomes.

That confidence matters because market-wide transformation ultimately depends on voluntary participation. If organisations lose faith in delivery, they will naturally focus their energies on initiatives they can control directly.

I’m also hearing a lot about how crucial standards are to this discussion. There’s a lot of debate whether London should adopt existing standards, extend them, or develop approaches tailored to its own requirements. Whatever path the market takes, securing agreement and buy-in right across the board is inherently more difficult than it is between individual trading partners. If London hopes to improve automation, interoperability and competitiveness over the long term, standards will remain a critical part of discussion.

Fundamentally, the market needs some clarity now. Market participants I talk to want to understand what survives from Blueprint Two, what can be recycled or reused, what lessons have been learned, and, crucially, what happens next. A huge amount of time, attention and resource have been invested. The opportunity now is to build on that work as far as possible and provide a clear direction for the future.

Anthony Freeman, Head of Development

Large-scale transformation programmes are inherently hard to deliver

The London Market is an exceptionally complex ecosystem involving a wide array of participants and a multitude of structures and systems. When a single programme attempts to change multiple interconnected processes simultaneously, that complexity and diversity becomes challengingly apparent.

That’s why I believe future progress is more likely to prove successful if it’s delivered incrementally. Instead of trying to change everything at once, carriers are likely to achieve more by tackling specific problems individually, delivering tangible improvements, and then building on their successes. Incremental change allows lessons to be learned, risks to be managed, and benefits to be realised sooner. It’s not a question of being less ambitious, just of taking a more realistic and immediately productive approach to change.

One lesson from the Blueprint Two experience is the importance of maintaining engagement with practitioners throughout a programme’s lifecycle. The London Market contains a vast amount of relevant expertise across carriers, brokers and technology providers. Future initiatives will benefit from harnessing that expertise continuously, step by step, rather than concentrating consultation at the outset and on delivery.

The London Market has no shortage of expertise. The challenge is ensuring that expertise continues to influence delivery as well as design.

Meanwhile, technology has moved on a long way since Blueprint Two was originally conceived. Cloud-native platforms, API-first architectures, artificial intelligence and advanced analytics have matured rapidly. Organisations now have many more options available to them than five years ago. It’s much more achievable now to modernise specific capabilities without replacing entire technology estates.

That flexibility creates opportunities. Rather than assuming that every organisation needs to operate within a single model, we should be creating an environment where systems and services can connect with minimal friction, where integrations can be reused, and where flexibility is built in to accommodate changing technology and business requirements.

The future could resemble a kind of federated ecosystem, within which diverse systems interconnect seamlessly. That approach could ultimately prove more resilient than attempting to converge around a single future architecture. Carriers should be able to adopt new services, integrations and technologies, without having to redesign everything around them. The easier it becomes to connect, disconnect and replace components, the easier it becomes to innovate.

Paula Wright, Client Technical Services Delivery Lead

Building for the future on the market’s greatest strength: its experience and expertise

While we look to the future to see what’s next for the London Market modernisation, it’s worth noting that the market’s existing infrastructure is not failing. Many of the systems that underpin the London Market continue to perform reliably and remain fit for today’s requirements. Improvements to services like DRI have been made and will continue to be made. While many of the technologies underpinning today’s environment were designed for a different era, they remain serviceable.

A key challenge to maintaining the existing infrastructure is the skill set required. Many of the people with deep expertise in legacy systems, messaging technologies and long-established market infrastructure are approaching retirement now. The risk isn’t so much that existing systems might suddenly stop working, but that the pool of people who understand intimately how those systems work, how they interact, and how they can be adapted, continues to shrink.

Any future market modernisation programme would not only provide the market with opportunities to embrace new technologies adopt new capabilities, integrate emerging technologies, or respond rapidly to changing requirements but also to attract a work force with the skill sets to support these new technologies.

Those planning any such initiative should be sure the market’s requirements have been fully recognised, captured and understood – and that the project will deliver what the market wants and needs, now and for the foreseeable future. Working with the many talented and experienced people still working in this market, they should focus on delivering an eco-system that’s designed with the market, rather than simply for the market – one where key decisions and assumptions are discussed and agreed upfront with the people who’ll be adopting and using the systems created.

Looking forward, one of the key architecture decisions would be around interoperability. Future market infrastructure should not require every participant to use identical technologies or operate within a single technology model. Modern integration technologies allow us to start thinking differently. Information can increasingly be captured in multiple formats, validated, transformed and distributed according to the specific needs of different participants. Whether information arrives via APIs, XML, JSON, or any other format, becomes less important than having the ability to exchange that information reliably, securely and consistently. This could be as a next-generation market gateway. Rather than trying to enforce uniformity, we need to focus on enabling compatibility. That leaves market participants free to continue innovating and evolving, while staying connected to a wider ecosystem.

I also believe there are important lessons to be learned from previous market successes. Initiatives like Writeback and Ruschlikon are instructive as examples of how successful market change has often come about. Neither attempted to transform the entire market in a single step. Instead, they addressed clearly defined problems, involved practitioners directly, and delivered measurable operational benefits. Carriers, brokers, technology providers and market bodies collaborated around practical objectives and delivered outcomes people could see and use. Those examples underline the reality that successful market change tends to emerge through collaboration.

The London Market’s greatest strength has always been the expertise, experience and relationships that exist across the market. Whatever follows Blueprint Two, I believe we need to keep those qualities at the centre of the conversation.

Lloyd Bizaoui, Product Manager

AI will change how market modernisation comes about

One of the most interesting things I’m hearing from carriers at the moment is that the conversation around AI has changed dramatically over the last eighteen months. The appetite for leveraging the power of AI is clearly there. The challenge is turning that appetite into production-ready solutions that satisfy governance, security, privacy and regulatory requirements.

Many organisations have spent the last few years waiting to see how Blueprint Two would shape the future market landscape. Today, many of those same organisations are experimenting actively with AI while simultaneously trying to determine how best to deploy it safely and effectively.

One of the most interesting aspects of AI is that it has the potential to allow organisations to modernise while continuing to operate. Historically, transformation programmes often assumed that new capabilities would require large-scale changes to underlying systems and processes. AI makes it possible to improve operational efficiency, extract value from unstructured information and surface new insights without first replacing every existing platform. In effect, the market has a much better chance of modernising while the engine’s still running.

AI also creates opportunities for new talent entering the market. Entry-level claims professionals can play an important role in ensuring that the rules applied by technology produce the outcomes expected and – where they don’t – by providing the human input required to improve those outcomes. Rather than simply replacing opportunities to learn, AI could help accelerate that learning by making rules, processes, and decision-making frameworks more explicit and more accessible. This could potentially provide new entrants with a faster route to developing expertise, while reinforcing the role of human judgement within the process.

In practice, rather than waiting for a single future architecture to emerge, we may see new forms of alignment develop organically. Organisations will continue pursuing different approaches. Some will succeed. Some will fail. But over time, successful methods of structuring information, sharing knowledge and extracting insight are likely to become more widely adopted.

This could ultimately create something resembling a common context layer across the market. Not necessarily a single platform or a centrally mandated architecture, but a shared understanding of information and risk that develops naturally through practical usage.

Technology platforms have an important role to play in enabling that evolution. The ability to structure previously unstructured information, surface operational signals and turn data into actionable insight has the potential to unlock significant value across claims, underwriting and operations. The opportunity is not simply to automate existing processes, but to make better use of the information the market already possesses.

If Blueprint Two was an attempt to modernise the market from the top down, AI may enable a more organic form of modernisation that develops from the bottom up. For now, that possibility remains speculative, but it may ultimately prove one of the most important developments shaping the London Market between now and 2030.

Entering a new phase

The Blueprint Two experience has reinforced some uncomfortable realities. Large-scale transformation programmes are tough to deliver. Standards take time to establish. Market-wide consensus is an elusive commodity. Trust is hard won and easily lost. But anyone who assumes the London Market is standing still, would be a long way off the mark.

Work continues on standards and data initiatives, and there’s no shortage of innovation in the claims management space. AI exploration and adoption is accelerating, and carriers are investing in automation, analytics and operational improvement. So, the flow of forward motion persists, just perhaps through rather different and more diverse channels than some had anticipated.

The sunsetting of Blueprint Two removes a source of uncertainty that has influenced technology planning and investment decisions across the market for several years. Organisations no longer need to frame every platform, integration, automation or AI decision around an anticipated future architecture that remains undefined.

That doesn’t mean acting in isolation. Common standards, shared data models and market-wide collaboration will remain important. But it does mean that carriers can increasingly focus on solving today’s problems while retaining the flexibility to adapt to tomorrow’s needs.

There are also signs that the centre of gravity within the market may be shifting. Increasingly, discussions appear to be focusing less on transformation as an objective in itself and more on the specific objectives of stronger underwriting performance, greater operational resilience, improved competitiveness and better customer outcomes.

Much remains uncertain at the time of writing. The market is still awaiting greater clarity on future priorities, delivery models, and implementation plans from Lloyd’s, Velonetic, the market associations, and other stakeholders. Until a clearer picture emerges, organisations across the market are understandably focused on their own operational priorities and transformation agendas. Our position at DOCOsoft remains unchanged. We continue to engage with and support all relevant market initiatives, building on work that’s already been completed, and engaging actively with ongoing discussions through forums like the Writeback Steering Committee. Whatever form the next phase of market modernisation ultimately takes, we’ll be closely involved and ready to help our clients adapt, evolve and take advantage of the opportunities it creates.