Professor Michael Mainelli is executive chairman of Z/Yen Group and principal advisor to Long Finance. His latest book, The Price of Fish: A New Approach to Wicked Economics and Better Decisions , written with Ian Harris, won the 2012 Independent Publisher Book Awards Finance, Investment & Economics Gold Prize.
In this special feature, Mainelli explores how distributed ledgers, or blockchains, could at last fully modernise an important industry that still over relies on paper. Insurance on tech display Do I Like TOM?
In April 2015, Lloyd’s of London launched the Target Operating Model (TOM) project. TOM is a central body responsible for delivering modernisation to the still heavily paper-based wholesale insurance transactions in the London insurance markets.
You can state ‘I Support TOM’ on a registration site or ‘like’ TOM on social media. There have been several ‘innovation’ events. There is an orange logo reminiscent of the 1990s when ‘orange was the new black’. The project has even tried to coin yet another tech mashup for the London insurance markets surrounding Lloyd’s – ‘InsTech’.
This is not the first time that the London insurance markets have tried to modernise. They are serial reformers, their attempts have had varying degrees of success, from total failure to middling impact.
Limnet (London Insurance Market Network) made progress with electronic data interchange in the 1980s and early 1990s. Electronic Placement Support (EPS) worked in the late 1990s, but few used it. Kinnect, at a cost conservatively quoted as £70m, was abandoned in 2006. Project Darwin, 2011 to 2013, achieved little. The Message Exchange Limited (TMEL) is a messaging hub for ACORD messages that has had modest success, but most people still use email.
Numerous private exchanges or electronic messaging ventures have gained only partial market shares. Xchanging Ins-Sure Services (XIS), a claims and premiums processing joint venture, […]
