Striding into 2018 with Innovative InsurTech Implementation
The London market is making great strides to achieving its modernisation agenda according to the latest issue of the London Market Group publication TOM News Bites. The latest issue is packed full of exciting news updates, which bodes well for the market as a whole. PPL, claims transformation, CSRP are all happening right now, which is great news for DOCOsoft’s customers.
Just as importantly, it can’t come soon enough for the market’s clients – the tens of thousands of businesses large and small that love the Lloyd’s brand and product but aren’t quite so enamoured of the length of time it sometimes takes to get things done.
As the opening remarks in the latest LMG newsletter makes clear, the amount of paper and administration that precedes and follows the face-to-face negotiation is making our operating costs uncompetitive compared to other markets. Lloyd’s Chief Operating Officer Shirine Khoury-Haq is positive for the future, however and determined to ensure that we create impetus for change in the London Market. Shirine says:
“We want to replace manually intensive paper tasks with electronic processes. Just the other week I watched an underwriter writing supplementary information on a proposal form which the broker had retyped after the original discussion and then reprinted. This was then given to someone else to scan and then type into a system. The broker also took the piece of paper back to the office for yet more scanning, typing, emailing and processing via the Bureau. Goodness. All this for an endorsement?”
It’s an extremely valid comment and I would like to endorse her point about endorsements!
PPL and electronic placement will remove admin and paperwork and the numbers are certainly very persuasive. It has been reported that:
• 29 brokers and 92 carriers have signed up so far
• More than 5,000 users have been set up on the platform.
• 15,000 risks have been bound
• More than half of all financial and professional lines risks are being placed on PPL.
The other important benefit is that the service also improves client service by providing greater transparency of information throughout the entire placing process.
So what else is happening?
The London Market Group reports strong progress in improving our central services so that brokers can use the same data and process standards as they do in other markets. Since the successful delivery of the last release of CSRP, for example, more than 30 brokers and service companies have confirmed their desire to go live in 2018.
According to the LMG, the ambition is for those who move first to gain cost and time savings, to gain competitive advantage. The vision is for cover-holders to have a single audit, in which consistent compliance processes are done once only, and that data is then shared with the relevant stakeholders. 98% of MAs have implemented this initiative.
As anyone that has been to a London market insurance conference or event in the last 12 months can tell you, data is the new oil and insurance companies are the carriers (not just of risk).
The London market has now developed a global data standard for risk information. The standard creates benefits not only for London, however but encompasses the global insurance market. At the same time a data glossary has been delivered and now 100 companies and more than 400 individuals are using the service.
The LMG says that Structured Data Capture or SDC is now live for all classes of business and has processed 10,000 risks and all this achieved with service levels and accuracy above 99%.
These are all very impressive numbers but what really counts is what does it all mean for our customers? As a business that builds claims management systems, the way of DOCOsoft is to improve the end customer claims experience, speed up settlements and increase customer engagement. This includes adding automation to the single claims agreement process, portals to improve data availability, updates to claims settlement process and, potentially robotics and A.I. solutions that add tangible value such as enabling a deeper dive into the ocean of data that the market contains.
Before we get ahead of ourselves though it is important not to lose sight of our core competencies and that holds true whether we are an MA, a broker or a humble claims management system provider like DOCOsoft. Claims is what we do so we are delighted to see that achieving further claims efficiencies and speeding up processes is one of the focuses for the TOM in 2018.
Shirine Khoury Haq, who is a key sponsor of the TOM has said “Nowhere is there a clearer demonstration of the purpose and value of insurance than in the payment of claims. The London market is committed to providing the best possible claims service and there is a real desire to improve the end-customer’s claims experience, a factor that ultimately drives customer satisfaction. We will be looking at a set of generally agreed claims requirements, partially documented in the original TOM Blueprint which have been discussed and socialised in the London Market over the last two or three years.”
Meanwhile, in the latest issue of TOM News Bites, Tony Rai, Head of London Market Claims at Hiscox commented “We must increase the speed of claims settlement so as to make London an easier place to do business. This includes adding automation to Single Claims Agreement Party, updates to claims settlement process and improving two-way customer communication – including considering more use of portals.”
At the same time, Charles Bush, Head of Property and Energy Claims at Zurich UK, says: “We need to ensure the longer term sustainability of our market place. The best way to do this is to deliver greatly improved customer outcomes by using modern and emerging technologies such as robotics and AI. The objective has to be that London delivers a world-leading and superior claims service, underpinned by a modern and flexible claims agreement platform.”
DOCOsoft has some exciting news on that front as well. To take advantage of the data insights in an organisation requires new ways of automatically organising, classifying and labelling documents. Using advanced machine learning techniques, DOCOsoft Data Analytics does just this. It takes thousands of documents as inputs and outputs their hidden thematic structure and relationships, which creates new insights while improving compliance, cost structures and competitiveness. Our machine learning technology crunches terabytes of data more efficiently and makes sense of a complicated claims world.
Insurance professionals have always had access to a vast pool of unstructured digitised documents but have never been able to structure their hidden value advantageously – until now. An innovative new solution developed by DOCOsoft provides a statistics-based method that can automatically read insurance texts. The advanced data analytics technology magnifies text (or data) that is indistinct and brings it into more granular focus with practical benefits for insurance companies and their clients. To find out more about the way of DOCOsoft’s data analytics, visit our website www.docosoft.com or email me at graham.sheppard@docosoft.com