Thoughts from Insurance Technology Congress 2013, London

Insurers and vendors met in London to discuss insurance technology on the 24^th and 25^th of September this year. The audience mostly consisted of those with an interest in the London market and Lloyds although there were representatives from general insurers in the UK too. I was glad to see that the tone of the meeting had shifted. In years past there has been a theme of technology and modernisation being necessary but too difficult. This is a market that has seen some high profile and expensive failures in IT along with successes. This week I heard again the call to action, the need to modernise but there was a much clearer sense of optimism, a way forward. There are still very large, expensive projects in the market with Jim Sadler, CIO of XChanging giving a colourful view of the latest deployment on behalf of the market. Alongside these are independent initiatives, demonstrating the value of standards and cooperation amongst competitors in the market. A panel discussing the eAccounting initiative, Ruschlikon, led by XL Group’s Simon Squires, gave a surprising engaging and transparent story of how a group of insurers and brokers collaborated and delivered to market technology that fundamentally improved their operations and speed of response to the insured. Genesis offered another example of a group of insurers coming together and collaborating to fix an issue that again, slowed down the market and affected customer service. In the course of the proceedings the architect of Genesis mentioned the best thing for the project would be that it is superseded by something that worked better, but that wasn’t a reason not to do it. Throughout the discussions there was a theme of automating where human interaction didn’t add value, but not automating for the sake of automation. There were discussions about delivering smaller projects, doing it quicker, collaborating and adopting standards where this didn’t affect competitive advantage and not doing so harmed customer service. Themes I expect we'll see repeated at next weeks Celent event in San Francisco. As before and for the last few decades, there was a sense of a need to modernise, to attract new talent, to move the market forward. This year there was a real sense of optimism, sample projects that have moved quickly and gained adoption, a way forward.