RebusIS' Robert Gogel says its time the industry started working smarter.
Lord Levene's recent call for insurers to stop shuffling mountains of paper around the office comes at an interesting juncture for the Lloyd's market.
I'm not a Lloyd's `lifer' but that may be an advantage when it comes to taking a rational view of this market. Lloyd's remains heavily paper-reliant - a state of affairs which threatens to jeopardise its status as the world's foremost insurance market. I can't think of another industry where this is acceptable.
Put simply there should be no excuses for remaining loyal to paper-based administration.
There are a range of initiatives aimed at modernising Lloyd's processes and practices, many of which RebusIS are involved with. The best known is probably Project Blue Mountain (PBM). It enables data to be transferred between different IT systems instantly. As a result, PBM offers significant potential cost-savings and efficiency gains for Lloyd's.
Similarly, an alliance of technology providers, the Repository Infrastructure Group (RIG), is formulating business standards in the insurance industry. These standards are central to the efficient usage of document repositories in the insurance sector. Initiatives like these form the essential elements for trading efficiently.
Individual companies cannot achieve the goal of improved productivity in the insurance sector alone. It is only through collaboration that acceptance of "joined up" technology can be achieved. This will leave underwriters and brokers free to get on with what they do best - the real business of insurance.
Robert Gogel can be reached at robert.gogel@rebusis.com or on +44 (020) 7661 4281.
