What does it mean to innovate in the insurance industry?
It takes more than replacing legacy systems for the latest management platforms for an insurance company to truly innovate. Especially now that the world is facing unprecedented economic (inflation, the linger effects of the pandemic) and environmental (impacts of climate change) challenges, innovation is needed now more than ever for insurers to level the playing field.
In an Insurance Business TV interview, Dawn Miller, commercial director at Lloyd’s, explained resetting the conversation around innovation means to her.
For Miller, innovation at Lloyd’s can be boiled down to two factors: Finding areas of improvement, and leveraging the success of its Lloyd’s Lab.
“How can we work to clear some of the obstacles that we have, over time, perhaps worked into some of our processes and policies?” the director said. “We’re a 300-year-old institution – of course there’s going to be all kinds of ways of working that have worked and adapted over time.”
Miller added that Lloyd’s is taking a conscious look at the way it works so that it can “clear that pathway for more innovation to come.”
The second factor is the company leveraging its Lloyd’s Lab – an insurtech accelerator program that looks to develop promising ideas and scale them with the help of the largest insurance market in the world.
“We have eight cohorts of 10 companies each come through, bringing all kinds of insurtech solutions – complex challenges to be dealt with – into the Lab space, where they’ve had exposure to all of our managing agents, brokers in the marketplace, and underwriting talent to help them along,” explained Miller.
Read more: Insurance underwriters - what do they do?
The challenge now, according to Miller, is how to turn the Lab into a “centerpiece for global innovation.”
“So, we’re looking at ways to do this,” she said. “Bringing back some alumni, creating partnerships with academia, partnerships with other labs in the world, bringing in a finance element to it – perhaps from our own environment, as well as crowdsourcing in a broader community around us.”
Miller also noted that another way the Lab could get its feet wet and reach out to as many markets around the globe as possible is to take the accelerator “on the road.” The director has also hinted that she would like to take the Lab to Canada someday.
