Blueprint Two benefits will take ‘quite some time’ to impact London market as project is ‘too big’

Executive director at wholesale broker Verlingue London Markets, Barry Reynolds, has expressed concerns about the delivery of Lloyd’s of London’s Blueprint Two project, citing that the initiative is “too big” in its current format and that it should have been broken down into “some very relevant chunks for delivery” from the get-go.

Blueprint Two is Lloyd’s of London’s road map for digitising the London market.

Launched in November 2020, Blueprint Two piggybacks off its predecessor plan, Blueprint One, which was published in September 2019 after the marketplace formally revealed its Future at Lloyd’s digital transformation strategy in May 2019.

Seeking to modernise the London market’s business models, practices and internal systems, Blueprint Two is focused on using digitalisation to make processes around placements, accounting and claims settlements more efficient.

Although delays to Blueprint Two’s proposed deadlines were perhaps understandable and expected during the Covid-19 pandemic years between 2020 and 2022 – when the world first learned how to operate remotely – the programme has continued to experience milestone setbacks in the subsequent years.

For example, despite work on the programme rumbling on for around five years now, Lloyd’s and its technology provider supporting the project, Velonetic, have confirmed that Blueprint Two’s phase one cutover has been pushed back further still into next year (2026).

“The current Blueprint Two project is a very important thing for the market to deliver – I’m just worried about when it’s going to deliver,” Reynolds told Insurance Times.

For him, the primary challenge facing Blueprint Two is that it is “too big” and that Lloyd’s may have bitten off more than it can chew in one sitting.

Instead, Reynolds feels that the project should have been “split down” further into “very specific areas” from the start, so that blocks of work “could have been delivered one after each other” rather than the market attempting a “big bang approach”.

He said: “The project is too big and maybe [needed] breaking down into some very relevant chunks for delivery. It’s just such an enormous project. It’s covering everything other than the placement.

“It’s such a large project – [especially with] the complexities that come with some of the placements – and trying to deliver on it is an enormous task.”

In terms of how Reynolds believes Blueprint Two’s goalposts should have been broken down, he explained: “We’ve got systems we use for placement, so that we can put a slip into the market and that will be agreed by the market. The next part of this [process] is then how that gets transacted through the market bureau.

“I think, initially, [how we link up the placement system to the submission into the market bureau could have been the first deliverable of Blueprint Two].

“But then there’s all the aspects around claims. I just think there’s so many things added [into the same phase in Blueprint Two], but it just needed to be broken down in some way.

“[Another] part of the issue is that the market is also standardising its data and making sure that every part of the market is using the same datasets. That in itself is an enormous task because there’s so many legacy systems that need to be dealt with.”

Firm readiness

Reynolds commented that Verlingue London Markets has been prepared to integrate with the mod cons associated with Blueprint Two since December 2023, when broker Verlingue UK rebranded its London market division shortly after Reynolds’ appointment that same month.

He explained: “This was something that was very high on our agenda back in December 2023. We’ve changed systems, so we’re ready to adopt the new London systems when they come.

“But I’m not really focused on it at all at the moment. I’m just allowing it to play out because I’m not sure when it’s actually going to be delivered as a system.

“The important thing is we’ve got the information technology and we’ve got the platform that could connect [to the new systems introduced by Lloyd’s].

“Until [the next round of] testing is complete, [integration] probably won’t be on our agenda. As soon as that’s complete, we’ll be back on it.

“We’re prepared, but I haven’t got a date in mind when I think this is going to go live. I think we need to wait for the market.”

Maintaining patience

Although Reynolds is sceptical about when exactly Blueprint Two will come to fruition, he is – however – crystal clear that the project is still “important” and that once finalised, “it’s going to be exactly what the market needs”.

He continued: “It will change the fact that we might need less people to process [the placement of policies]. But, therefore, we can utilise those people to trade.

“It’s a project that needs doing and it needs completing – but we’re sitting back now and just waiting.”