Reflections on Insurance Insider’s London Market Conference 2025

Insurance Insider’s London Market Conference is a reliably good barometer for our market’s current priorities, ambitions, hopes and anxieties. This year’s event on 13 November felt different in one important respect. For the first time in a long time, there was a broad shared acknowledgement that claims technology is no longer a peripheral or secondary conversation. Investment in claims capabilities is accelerating, priorities are aligning, and carriers are making decisions now, not waiting for perfect clarity on the market’s future infrastructure.

DOCOsoft CEO Aidan O’Neill took part in a panel discussion on elevating the role of claims, alongside Janine Powell (LMA), Kerry Williams (AEGIS) and Alex Reynolds (Marsh). More on this below, but it’s encouraging to see claims starting to gain greater prominence on conference agendas.

Perhaps the most talked-about session of the day, was the keynote address given by Lucy Clarke of WTW. Coming immediately after Patrick Tiernan’s scene-setter, her message to the market was well worth hearing, combining both an invitation and a challenge.

Rising client expectations

Lucy Clarke spoke, not as a representative of a single firm, but as someone who is steeped in – and cares about – the London Market. She stressed that clients evaluate this market through the lens of a simple set of expectations: clarity, dependable claims outcomes, stable capital, forward-looking solutions and a digital experience that matches the pace of their own industries. None of that should be controversial, but hearing it laid out so clearly certainly focused delegates’ attention.

As a core claims systems provider, we at DOCOsoft were gratified at the emphasis she placed on technology’s role in addressing current market challenges and opportunities. She emphasised that tech-based tools that simplify complexity, support consistency, and raise service baselines are no longer simply nice to have – they’re what enables carriers and brokers to meet clients where they are, not pull them back into legacy workflows.

Our world is getting riskier – and clients feel it

Lucy Clarke’s take on the global risk environment was stark. Near-term geopolitical volatility, longer-term climate stresses, and emerging exposures from AI and cyber risk are coming together to create an unprecedented level of uncertainty – something of which clients are only too keenly aware. She shared research findings from the World Economic Forum that highlighted widespread concerns about the future. It is sobering to hear that just 1% of global leaders feel relaxed or ‘calm’ about what’s coming down the line over the next few years.

Against this backdrop, the London Market cannot continue relying on tradition. This could help explain why investment in technology – particularly around claims – is finally coming onstream now. When risks are fast-moving and interconnected, carriers need better visibility, better data foundations, and faster ways of turning information into decisions. In that sense, the market is finally making the shift that Lucy described: capital, appetite, and digital transformation are starting to come into alignment.

Elevating claims in a dynamic landscape

The panel discussion in which DOCOsoft’s Aidan O’Neill took part picked up many of these threads. Insurance Insider’s Rachel Dalton opened with the observation that claims is where the market’s promise is most visible – and ultimately where it’s tested. Which makes it all the more ironic that – until very recently – claims hasn’t had the profile or the investment it needs and deserves.

The panel’s discussion on AI combined optimism and realism. There was broad agreement that the thing that’s generating most value currently is automating low-value easily replicable tasks. Things like ingesting unstructured emails into structured events, triaging workflow, routing claims to the most appropriate handler, and summarising lengthy documents. These have all now emerged as areas where forward-looking carriers are seeing real-world efficiency gains.

The panellists also agreed that the value of AI increases in proportion to the quality of the underlying data. Kerry Williams highlighted the persistent challenge facing a market that is ‘dripping in data’ but which currently has that data dispersed and trapped in multiple inboxes, legacy systems and other formats that simply aren’t joined up. Alex Reynolds noted the blurred lines and workarounds that slow decision-making and frustrate the application of analytics. Janine Powell encouraged the market to focus on collectively defining what outcomes we want from AI, rather than simply asking it to automate established practice.

One area on which all agreed was the vital importance of accessing the right talent in the claims arena. It seems clear that AI will fundamentally alter the shape of early-career claims roles, and the market will need to adapt. But the London Market will remain as dependent as it’s ever been on the deep judgement, technical creativity, and relationship-led problem solving that have long been among its defining characteristics. If anything, those human strengths will become more vital as automation scales.

Why investment is starting to flow

One of the questions put to the panel was whether delays to Blueprint Two have been a drag on progress, or created a sense of uncertainty around technology decisions. DOCOsoft’s view, based on the many conversations we have across the market, is that carriers are no longer waiting on progress with Blueprint Two, and that investment hesitancy is fading fast. Over recent years it certainly has been the case that many carriers were putting off investment decisions, but in the past 18 months, the floodgates have well and truly opened.

We’re increasingly seeing carriers moving ahead with cloud adoption, data-model redesign and workflow modernisation, and introducing more scalable integration-friendly platforms. The prevailing view seems to be ‘Let’s get on with the things we can get done now – and let the market infrastructure catch up when it’s ready’. This shift in mindset is significant. It also helps explain why the long-overdue investment in claims technology we’re seeing now is gathering pace so rapidly.

A profession coming into its own

Another point of agreement was the increasing participation of claims leaders within carrier executive committees. Ten years ago, this was far less common. Today, we’re seeing more and more heads of claims at the top table, influencing strategy, rather than simply supporting it after the event. As Kerry and Alex both noted, the data and insight generated by claims are absolutely integral to things like reserving accuracy, product design, renewal strategy and client engagement.

Clients increasingly want to speak directly to claims specialists. They want to know who will support them at the moment of truth. Clients see this market at its best when the claims function performs to its full potential. When that doesn’t happen, the client experience can easily be damaged in ways that pricing alone can’t fix.

Using technology where it matters

One recurring theme across the event was how well this market continues to respond to catastrophe events. The devastating LA wildfires earlier this year are an obvious case in point. As several different speakers noted, the market responded with speed, collaboration, and effective use of geospatial imagery and ground intelligence to make impressively prompt payments – at scale. This is one of those eye-catching contexts in which technology really proves its worth: not as a replacement for expertise, but as a means of enabling and accelerating the actions that restore lives and businesses.

Looking ahead to 2026

If there was a single headline takeaway from the conference, it was that the London Market is ready to push forward. Claims is no longer an afterthought as this market looks to transform itself to compete in tomorrow’s global insurance marketplace. Claims is increasingly at the forefront of innovation. Investment is starting to flow, the vital role of human expertise is more explicitly recognised, and the digital foundations for future success being put in place.

As a technology partner who’s been embedded in this market for many years, DOCOsoft has long been aware of the transformative potential of technology in the claims sector. The most encouraging signal we picked up at the LMC was that the wider market increasingly sees it too and is acting on it.

Naturally, next year will not be without challenges. But it feels like we’re finally entering a phase where digital progress and claims excellence can advance together. And that can only be good for carriers, clients and the long-term health of the London Market.