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MARINE | Claims technology In association with Ed.
Upgrade time Technology kept London claim payments flowing during lockdown, but it’s time for an upgrade. Antiquated systems need replacement. Cross-market input into the design of a single solution will be key to its success argues David Jones, Divisional Claims Director, Marine at leading London broker Ed. It is often said that technology saved the London insurance market during Covid lockdowns. Invariably that talk is about systems supporting placement, including PPL, and popular third-party or broker systems like Whitespace and our own TradEd. Technology also came to the rescue of claims – the part of insurance that clients really care about – but here the market relied on old systems. In tech terms, they’re positively geriatric. London’s company market insurers had claims technology back in the 1980s. ‘CLAMS’ and ‘ELASS’ were merged in the 1990s to create the Claims Loss Advice and Settlement System (CLASS), a data storage platform which still provides the backbone of London claims IT. About twenty years ago Lloyd’s and the IUA began working on digital claims processing. They launched Electronic Claims Filing (ECF) in 2004, upgraded it in 2011, and introduced ECF Write Back in 2019, which allows carriers (but not brokers) to use ECF from within their own systems. Now ECF is used for more than 95% of Lloyd’s claims, and 85% of company-market claims. The system works. It kept the indemnities flowing during lockdown, and, because we’ve had ECF and CLASS for so long, claims practitioners were already more geared to electronic dealing than our colleagues on the placing side.
UPDATE NEEDED Although they work, London’s claims management systems need updating, crisis or no crisis. For one thing, The Marine Insurer Claims Edition | September 2021
Lloyd’s is now talking about the introduction of a brand-new system for claims. In its Blueprint 2 plan for market modernisation, Lloyd’s said: “We will deliver a platform that will lead to a seamless customer experience designed to meet their expectations.”
although they’re united in theory, in practice we must enter each and every cross-market claim separately for each bureau, into loosely linked, discrete processing systems. That increases the chances of error and wastes huge amounts of time. London suffers another issue. Once a claim is agreed, the broker must wait three days for the indemnity payment to arrive in the relevant bank account. I have sometimes received settlements from following markets located overseas before the money has arrived from the London lead, that may be located just around the corner. That’s crazy. Payment time is critical to compete with markets around the world. In practice, placement decisions by retail buyers are typically price-driven. But when our clients are other insurance professionals, they notice such differences, since their clients are likely to blame them for any delay. Happily, Lloyd’s is now talking about addressing these challenges through the introduction of a brand-new system for claims. In its Blueprint 2 plan for market modernisation, Lloyd’s said: “We will deliver a platform that will lead to a seamless customer experience designed to meet their expectations.
