Flexibility will be why Blueprint Two succeeds

Work on Blueprint Two continues, and the market feedback loop is tremendously valuable, writes Courtenay Davison, AdvantageGo’s BP2 project manager.

Progress on Lloyd’s Blueprint Two (BP2) continues promisingly. The transformative tech project for Lloyd’s of London is not a simple one; the complicated nature of the Lloyd’s market means it could never be so.

But it is actually when BP2 has erred in its ways previously that the project has showcased the collaborative characteristics that make it all the more likely to ultimately succeed. What I’m talking about here is the feedback loop we’re seeing in action, which is a virtuous example of market-wide collaboration within the BP2 process.

For a technology project to succeed, it needs buy-in. The more stakeholders and actors you introduce, the more likely it is that somebody won’t commit to it. The Lloyd’s market has many actors and it has to work by committee. This requires communication and compromise to function effectively, which is why previous tech projects may have stalled and at times failed to deliver.

We are seeing buy-in across BP2: from the brokers; from the carriers; and from vendors like us. The programme is still moving, and definitions around the solution are not set in stone.

The Lloyd’s joint venture and DXC Technology have come up with a two-way process that is functioning very well, with updates shared with vendors across forums – providing opportunity for feedback.

AdvantageGo witnessed a great example of this. In its initial stages the market delivery team proposed a solution that involved changing a data field utilised widely across all vendor applications (BSND). When this was played back to the development team by our business analyst, they took the feedback on board and changed their approach. The system works! We are being listened to.

For people who don’t use the tech, the above might seem a very specific example, but this feedback loop is tremendously valuable. We’re working together as a community to say collectively what is the best way to make something happen, with the least pain for everybody involved. This hasn’t always been the case in the past, but it shows we’re heading to the right place with BP2.

What’s next? Well, still quite a lot.

We are building a solution based on the 90% we know will make up the finished BP2, but flexible enough for the other 10% still undecided. We know we’re working with a moving target, as we move towards going live, possibly at the end of 2024.

We’re currently building our prototype message gateway. It’s an iterative process. The Lloyd’s JV and DXC are issuing specifications as they go; we assess them, understand them, and decide changes to make and then move forward.

Next comes the future approach to create a message consumption mechanism. In an ideal world – one with unlimited budgets – existing policy administration systems (PASs) would take full advantage of a digital marketplace. They would use a lot more process automation artificial intelligence than they do at present. The fundamental tenet of BP2 is that it’s data driven and that the data it’s based on are always correct rather than open to interpretation.

This is very powerful. If you know your data is correct you can automate things that use and manipulate that data. This is the future of the processing world, with fewer human interventions and manual processes, moving towards something more streamlined and more automated, with cleaner, more reliable and more accurate data.

Our strategy is pragmatic. It’s to get our customers digital on day one with minimal impact to their existing PAS and therefore impact on their time/resource/cost. That needs to be underpinned with a clear roadmap of how our services will then enable all the benefits a digital marketplace can offer. This is the next, exciting, part of the Blueprint journey for AdvantageGo.