The Hartford – PPL and a digital journey in London
Colin Sprott, chief international underwriting officer, and Matt Pasterfield, chief international operating officer, at The Hartford in London talk about their transformational journey and the role PPL has played.
The Hartford in London is committed to modernising its applications and processes and is excited by the vision laid out in Blueprint Two, Lloyd’s strategy to build the most advanced insurance marketplace in the world through advanced digitisation. We have an aggressive timeline and PPL has been an important part of our transformational journey. We see this as an existential moment in the marketplace and look forward to our partnership.
Over the course of our doing business in the market, we have routinely seen our bound and quoted business easily exceed Lloyd’s mandated targets. This has helped us internally to prepare for the future enhancements expected in the Blueprint.
The onset of the global pandemic in 2020 and the continuation of remote working has meant that PPL has been a critical component of our response. It has allowed us to continue to operate as close to normal as is possible during these unprecedented times. It is hard to think how we would have kept trading in a subscription market without this well-functioning interconnectivity between managing agents and brokers. It has challenged some of our existing preconceptions about how business needs to be traded, and we will continue to learn and adapt. We now see different pathways for business of varying complexity and are redesigning how we intend to operate; always with the interests of the intermediary and customer foremost in our thinking.
We see digital submissions as being a critical component of our future operating model. This does not just relate to operational efficiency, but also improved data quality and, as a result, improved analytical capabilities for our underwriters. Future enhancements will no doubt help further, with the core data standards central to our enthusiasm for the next steps.
Our parent company in the US has significant experience and capabilities in the field of data management and digital conversion (especially in the small commercial and SME space). There are many things we can learn from them on how we create a suite of connected digital applications – with the aim of reducing data re-keying, improving data quality, enhancing our capabilities with data science and becoming a truly modern player in the London market.
We are investing significant effort and attention across our organisation to achieve this and deploying a cross-functional approach to make it a reality. By putting better information at the fingertips of our underwriting teams we should improve our expense and loss ratios as well as opening up potential new revenue streams and product opportunities.
We believe digital conversion is the future of insurance. For a specialty player like us, it will supplement and not replace the underwriting specialty knowledge of our teams – it’s a winning combination of experienced underwriting decision makers who have access to much more real-time data to help them make the right call on the risks presented. Our goal is to give our underwriters the same kind of competitive advantage that we enjoy elsewhere within The Hartford through data science and analytics.