Lloyd's Lab fusion
On 21-23 July, the Lloyd's Lab ran a new three-day programme: the Lloyd’s Lab Fusion event, designed to test early-stage start-up ideas aimed at dealing with COVID-19 and other systemic risks.
Supported by innovators from more than 10 Lloyd's managing agents, the participating teams rapidly developed their ideas over the three days and presented these to a panel of judges from the Lloyd’s Corporation and Market.
Following much debate over a high standard of innovative presentations, we are delighted to announce Ryskex as the event winner.
Ryskex joined the lab looking to find a solution to insuring uninsurable systemic risks. Their aim was to develop an idea for a parametric risk transfer solution for events, however changed direction during the programme to focus on developing cover for widespread, long-lasting power outages in the US power grid. They propose to bring together insurers, customers, and capital markets to develop parametric coverage for this systemic risk.
The team had the highest overall score from the market judges and was singled out for its highly ambitious plan which supports Lloyd’s commitment to progressing solutions for global industry and government partnerships to fast-track society’s recovery from COVID-19 and provide greater resilience to future systemic risks. Find out more about the Lloyd’s report launched on 1 July: “Supporting global recovery and resilience for customers and economies: the insurance response to COVID-19.”
Geollect, Hivemind, and Survenus also all delivered excellent results in the programme.
Geollect are a former Lloyd's Lab participant and have made huge progress since joining. They impressed the judges with a strong COVID-19 focussed solution which can also be applied to other systemic risks. They developed a prototype over the three days to help the market understand their real-time exposure from cruise ships that are currently held up at ports due to COVID-19 travel restrictions in areas liable to tropical storms. They developed their product during the three days at an impressive pace and have been invited to join the fifth cohort of the lab to continue this excellent and timely work.
Hivemind’s product, Agora, is a platform which can be used to run prediction markets – ways of getting information from experts or from crowds. They worked on different ideas for how their product could be used to help insurers price risk and landed on a plan to launch a prediction market to evaluate the number of COVID cases in the US as a proxy for a pandemic severity indicator. In addition, they also propose to explore a prediction market to elicit the number of landfalling hurricanes in the US. Hivemind have also been invited to join the fifth cohort of the lab.
Survenus is a very early-stage start-up based in Portugal. They have developed a platform which combines high-quality, near real-time global data on the spread of infectious diseases and worked in the lab on how this could help the Lloyd's market price and model its pandemic exposure.
We would like to thank all the mentors, judges, and participants for making the first Lloyd's Lab Fusion event such a success.