In my previous column, I lobbed out a few spoilers about what might be on LIIBA’s 2024 Agenda. We published that esteemed volume at the end of January. Front and centre to our work this year will be the need to ensure our community plays its part in the adoption of the new Blueprint Two services. So, I thought that this month we might take a look at how that is going.
It is probably worth reminding ourselves, because it can get lost in the noise, of why we are doing this in the first place. I give you one statistic to justify this: our accounting process for premium and claims payments currently runs an error rate of around 25%. That is, to use the technical term, ridiculous. Even if all we do this year is reduce that number to somewhere near zero where it should be, we can all go home. It is not going to get any better than that. And that has been the experience of introducing the same structured data approach to reconciliation in non-bureau markets that we are now seeking to bring to the market’s interactions with Velonetic. So, it can be done. It is a huge prize in terms of the amount of cost and rework we can take out of the market’s core function. It is more than worth the effort that we will all have to put in this year.
So, how is adoption going to work? The first secret to adoption is having something to adopt. So, it is vital that new services are delivered on schedule with sufficient time for firms to do the testing and training of staff that they need to. We remain on course for all this to have happened by July and our community is fully committed to being ready for that date. But it would be wrong for us to focus on our community as a homogenous bunch when it comes to the challenge of embracing these new ways of working.
I see the broking world splitting into three distinct groups for this endeavour. At the top end in terms of size (but not in terms of the love they get from their trade association – that is equally distributed across the membership) we have large multinational firms with sizeable internal change capabilities. They just need to be told what they need to do and left to get on with it. We can be confident they know what they are doing.
At the opposite end, we have the heartland of our brethren – the 80% of LIIBA-world who employ 50 or fewer staff. In the main these firms will be entirely reliant on their software providers to deliver for them. Generally, these firms see their provider as pretty much their outsourced IT department. So, it is really encouraging to see how well the Blueprint Two team has engaged with these providers. All key suppliers have been involved in the many workshops and roundtables and were prominent at the recent update event on Bishopsgate.
Bookended between these two groups lie the firms I think will need the most direct support. These are firms roughly occupying the M portion of SME. They may have some in-house expertise but are still heavily dependent on their suppliers to deliver for them. These firms will need a unique package of information, encouragement and reassurance to make sure they are ready on time. This is why they will be a prime focus of our support work.
And what will that entail? To borrow a phrase from John McCain’s doomed 2008 Presidential run (nothing like drawing on the inspiration of winners), we will be pursuing an “all of the above” strategy. That means sending out as much information as possible as soon as we have it; it means running webinars to ensure firms have the right understanding of what they need to do; it means working with the Lloyd’s team to give them the right access to the right decision-makers; and it means just turning up to talk people through the process and give them comfort they are on the right track.
As with so much that goes on between LIIBA and its members, this will be a collective effort – members supporting members with us in the middle to co-ordinate. But the cohesive result will be a community ready to go for 1 July. We can’t wait.
