72 Process Optimisation Lloyd’s Lab Impact Report 73 Sharing knowledge to manage risk But their product had not been tried within the London Cohort 4, 2020 insurance market. This established business needed access to testing opportunities and the expertise of the Lab ecosystem to help it rebuild its product to work for commercial P&C insurers. Optalitix joined the Lab programme and they were In a centuries-old marketplace, it seems somehow appropriate that there assigned six mentors, including one from the Future at are times when step-change improvements to customer processes Lloyd’s team. The mentors supplied over a dozen models for Optalitix to test-convert. This gave Optalitix emerge, not from young businesses, but from established 昀椀rms invited to a bank of valuable proof-of-concept case studies, and transfer their solutions into the Lloyd’s space. In this situation, Lloyd’s Lab the opportunity to see clearly what was needed to drive the digitisation of P&C customer journeys. is a powerful force for change, with the Lab team enabling ‘not from here’ Optalitix found that their participation in the Lab 昀椀rms to understand the market and supporting their innovation for the provided real insight into the Lloyd’s market and the bene昀椀t of clients. software systems that drive it. As a result, they are now not only already working directly with syndicates, but also building a quote system for Lloyd’s which South African 昀椀rm Optalitix had been working with consumer insurance businesses to operationalise their embeds their software into some of the processes that data for more than a decade; but were eager to see if are already underway within the Future at Lloyd’s. An they could deliver bene昀椀ts to underwriting teams existing product has been guided into the market operating in the Lloyd’s market, which was a new 昀椀eld through the innovation process, supporting the for them. The Lab gave Optalitix a space to prove their marketwide initiatives to digitise underwriting data, as concept in the London market, access to willing well as providing process improvements for individual partners who allowed them to test their thinking, and market 昀椀rms. ultimately brought to market a fully-worked product which Lloyd’s itself has used. The Optalitix team say “you have to enter a new market by considering what you can do for it, not what it can do for you”. Participation in the Lab has meant they can do just that. Unlocking data A key part of the Future at Lloyd’s programme is the digitalisation of customer journeys, a programme that is split into ‘getting covered’, and ‘recovering from loss’. The Optalitix team understood that one issue with digitisation in the ‘getting covered’ phase is that the underwriting data of many underwriting teams is locked in, embedded in the team’s own Excel spreadsheets, and only accessible via bespoke macros. The data is essentially trapped, holding back any kind of cross-market data initiative that would improve the ease of getting quotes for clients, or speed up the underwriting process for them. However, Optalitix had an existing product, Acumen, that was designed to draw data from any Excel spreadsheet and convert it into 昀氀exible API data. Acumen allows previously ‘trapped’ data to be embedded into other systems, meaning that a group of individual underwriting data sets can be quickly and easily shared into a format that is signi昀椀cantly more scalable. © Lloyd’s