Earlier in March, The Leaders Council reported that VIPR CEO Paul Templar shared insight in an Insurance Day article about the technology standards of Lloyd’s Blueprint Two plans. With the latest Blueprint Two developments having suggested that Lloyd’s remains keen to work with the market going forward on better data quality and common data standards, VIPR’s chief operating officer, Stewart Williams, believes that the company is well-placed to play a part in improving the cost savings that Blueprint Two will bring.
The Blueprint Two reforms were first launched in November 2020, in the hope of offsetting £800 million of costs from the market by the end of 2022. However, following research from Simon Asplen-Taylor, the data lead for the Future at Lloyd’s reform programme, Lloyd’s believes these savings have the potential to be even higher.
In a recent webinar, Asplen-Taylor explained that his research had uncovered a multitude of inefficiencies in the market around data processing which could be improved on.
One example he gave in the webinar was that brokers and managing agents are filling out some data fields on as many as 31 separate occasions, leading to needless amounts of time and effort spent rekeying and some data being lost.
The revelation was enough for Lloyd’s chief executive John Neal to announce that the final cost savings of Blueprint Two could go well beyond the £800 million estimate first noted back in November, which incidentally came as no surprise to Williams nor the wider VIPR senior leadership team.
Williams said: “At VIPR, we’re not surprised by this. In fact, when brokers and Managing General Agnts [MGAs] start to combine the effects of Lloyd’s common data record with top class data management and reporting software, we’d be more surprised if the market doesn’t save a lot more.”
Williams continued: “Looking at the key themes of Blueprint Two, they include an emphasis on data quality, the need for clients to be able to self-select their systems so they can manage their data in the way that is best-suited to their business requirements, a note that Application Programming Interfaces [APIs] should be provided to connect the data, and a reduction in the duplication of effort.”
Furthermore, Williams believes that VIPR is a business in a prime position to assist with such solutions.
“At VIPR, we already provide the first two of these elements. Once the APIs are available, we’ll be able to feed the data to central repositories. These will become the source for others to extract that data. Because the data will already be in a standardised form, the need to rekey data will virtually disappear in many cases.”
The first version of the Lloyd’s “core data” format is already up and running. On March 11, Lloyd’s announced that the first version of its core data record [CDR] had gone live, in collaboration with ACORD to adopt the global standards already used in the London and international markets.
Lloyd’s is now in the process of conducting a market-wide consultation in order to garner feedback on the first version of the CDR.
Addressing this, Williams said: “We at VIPR welcome these latest developments. It indicates that Blueprint Two is on course and it also shows that Lloyd’s remains keen to work with the market going forward. With better data quality and common data standards, we believe that the majority of rekeying and data duplication being done by many brokers and MGAs today will disappear altogether.
“Certainly, we feel we can play our part in continuing to support these efforts, and in continuing to help brokers and MGAs cut costs more than they ever thought possible, simply through better data management and more actionable reporting.”
