‘We rely on them to feed us’ – brokers praised for role in capturing data

Brokers are key when it comes to data capture – and Lloyd’s of London’s Blueprint Two programme can help bolster the process.

That was according to Bent Isachsen, chief operating officer at Hamilton managing agency, who said the firm relied on brokers to “feed” them information.

“I am not a huge fan of unstructured data, relying on artificial intelligence (AI) or any other chatbots trying to ingest the data, I prefer to get it from the source,” he said at the Verisk conference earlier this month (6 September 2023).

“We are beholden to the broker, that’s our distribution channel. We rely on them to feed us.”

And he felt that Lloyd’s new digital transformation programme could improve the process, with it focusing on digitalising the mid to back-office functions.

The £300m digital revamp project began in November 2020 following the culmination of Lloyd’s Future at Lloyd’s digital transformation initiative in 2019.

He said Blueprint Two was a positive thing and could not see “masses of risk” involved.

Speaking about its implementation, he said: “Communication out there is so substantial [and] because we are all going through digital phase one, we are all going to end up at the same starting point and middle of next year is the plan.”

Trading platform

Meanwhile, Isachsen said that as more firms adopt digital solutions, his strategic planning would revolve around how the firm can ingest data from any trading platform at submission stage.

This is when a proposal for insurance is submitted to an underwriter. Most of this information comes in via email but this is subject to change.

When asked what the next year might entail, Isachen said that Placing Platform Limited (PPL) would be an ”exciting change”.

PPL is part of the Future at Lloyd’s strategy, which provides a single market solution for electronic placing that allows for brokers and insurers to quote, negotiate and bind business electronically.

“There is no way we’re going to continue shifting paper on an email. [PPL] means we can create real value to condense what we do as an organisation instead of chipping away on a couple of accounts and back office [processes].”