Lloyd’s partnership with insurtech Optalitix to save market 13,000 admin hours a year

Every year, we see the huge impact that natural catastrophe events have on communities – from the devastation of hurricanes in Florida, to the destruction from wildfires in California.  This is where Lloyd’s promise to pay valid claims and help our customers in times of need really comes to the fore. 

While we remain focused on handling these claims, understandably the local regulators need a lot of information from our market and our claims partners on the ground to track progress of the claims. Given these requests for information need to be handled at the very time that we want our market focused on supporting customers, we aspired to find a solution to make sure both regulatory reporting requirements were met whilst minimising the reporting burden on the market. 

For this reason, we were delighted to discover a new reporting portal for catastrophe data identified by the Lloyds Lab - a 10-week programme that sees Lloyd’s partner with innovative start-ups to identify and leverage insurtech solutions that could add value to the Lloyd’s Market – resulting in a reduction of more than 13,000 hours of data entry per year.

How it happened

For the Lloyd’s market, profitable underwriting depends on continually improving tools and techniques used to select and assess risks, manage risk portfolios and optimise the claims handling process. As we know, Data is at the crux of these items and therefore one of the themes for Cohort Four was ‘Data and models’. Around the same time, Technical Claims Manager Martin Canavan was keen to find a more efficient method of capturing and collating regulatory reporting data following catastrophes – both for Lloyd’s and the market as a whole. There has been a steady increase in the amount of data requested for each catastrophe, coupled by a rise in catastrophic events worldwide. Together this has created a heavy administrative burden on all those involved.

Once aware of Martin’s market reporting problem, Craig Civil, our Head of Innovation and Lloyd’s Lab mentor, immediately saw potential in one of the Lloyd’s Lab cohort members. Optalitix, a London-based artificial intelligence (AI) software company which enables insurers to submit complex data intelligently and simply, was able to develop a rapidly deployed Proof of concept (POC) within a week using an agile methodology to deliver in record time. Both Craig and Martin reviewed and tested a sample of data with market participants over the summer; and in just a few months, they authorised Optalitix to create a full-build version available to market users by the end of the year.

The outcome

The portal is now live, with more than 180 users, and is providing immediate benefit to the market. It is estimated the new portal reduces the administrative burden across all stakeholders in the catastrophe regulatory reporting process and saving more than 13,000 hours of data entry per year - allowing for more value-add, customer-facing activity.

This is a great example of collaboration between the Future at Lloyd’s programme, Lloyd’s Lab, and innovative market SMEs to quickly introduce digital solutions that add immediate value. And innovation doesn’t stop here – This platform is open-architecture and flexible, which means that it can be adapted to align with future developments in the digital claims journey.