For Lloyd’s commercial director Dawn Miller, innovation stands as the driving force behind the continued success of any industry.
In a recent interview with IBTV, Miller shed light on the significance of innovation within Lloyd’s and its pivotal role in driving cultural change.
She called innovation the “heartbeat” of the marketplace, pointing to how “risk taking and risk sharing” have been instrumental in advancing society throughout history.
“Look at the innovations that have happened in the insurance marketplace,” she said. “Around the time of COVID, you saw an industry come together creating transportation, manufacturers liability, no-fault liability, and other types of programs to make sure those vaccines got where they needed to go as fast as possible.”
When asked how innovation plays a role in her work as commercial director, she said it addressed longstanding obstacles that have accumulated within Lloyd’s processes and policies over its history.
“We're a 330-year-old institution. Of course, there's going to be all kinds of ways of working that have worked and have adapted over time,” Miller said. “So, we're taking a conscious look at that to say, ‘How can we clear that pathway for more innovation to come into our platform?’”
One of the key elements in Lloyd's innovation strategy is the Lloyd’s Lab, which hosts a 10-week insurtech accelerator program.
The lab has successfully facilitated the collaboration between different insurtechs and provided them with “exposure to all of our managing agents and brokers in the marketplace, and underwriting talent to help them along,” according to Miller.
The next step would be to amplify the lab’s impact on a global scale. Miller also remarked on the possibility of taking the lab “on the road” to Canada, calling it one of her favourite parts of the discussion.
“We're looking at [different] ways to do this,” she said. “Bringing back some alumni, creating partnerships with academia or partnerships with other labs around the world, bringing in a finance element to it, perhaps from our own environment, as well as crowdsourcing and [creating] a broader community around us.”
Watch the full interview to learn more about Dawn Miller’s thoughts on innovation.
