The world’s always been a risky place. But in the last decade, it’s transformed into a more complex, connected and changing environment than we’ve ever seen before.
Only innovative, resilient and digital organisations will be able to keep up with the changes.
I’m aware I’m writing this from the vantage point of a 300-year-old marketplace: one renowned for marble, mahogany and time-formed tradition. Our challenge is therefore to use the library of data and expertise we’ve developed over recent centuries to stay at the forefront of innovation.
This month, the Lloyd’s Lab — our award-winning Insurtech innovation hub — celebrated five years of pioneering new ideas to solve the complex questions our world faces. We’ve seen over a hundred startups in that time, with over a billion dollars of capital raised for the solutions which have emerged from the Lab, and 95% are still growing or have seen a successful sale.
But this innovation also requires partnership across sectors. If you accept the world is a connected chain of events and risks, then preparedness must start with the whole system.
It’s where endeavours like the Sustainable Markets Initiative — convened by His Majesty The King and chaired by Lloyd’s for the Insurance Task Force — are helping build resilience by bringing businesses, governments and NGOs together to introduce solutions that help us prepare for the impacts of climate change.
The recently signed memorandum of understanding with the UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) to support public-private frameworks in countries like Fiji shows the scale of both our cooperation, and our ambition.
Innovation and collaboration are enabling the insurance industry to take on new and emerging risks — from climate change to cyber risks and autonomous vehicles — in order to support society’s resilience.
We want that growing range of solutions to be matched by the growing diversity of our sector. A broader base of ideas and backgrounds will help us see the world in new ways and understand our customers more intuitively.
Same marble, less paper
Transforming a tradition-steeped institution will take time — but we’ve seen the numbers on both ethnic diversity and gender diversity improve in recent years, supported by our one in three ambition for ethnically diverse recruitment and our 35% target for women in leadership.
We need to go further and faster, but the signs are encouraging — supported by all our market firms and trailblazing recruitment organisations like Equity, the new incarnation of the African-Caribbean Insurance Network, which began at Lloyd’s.
To support that progress, we’re building a space they can enjoy working in. Last month we reopened Lloyd’s Underwriting Room — same marble, less paper — following renovation works. It’s created a Room that looks sharper and smarter than ever before, and we’ve seen the difference: footfall has been 20% higher since reopening.
Our Room also now better equipped to support underwriting in a digital world, aligning with our market digitalisation programme to make doing business at Lloyd’s better, faster and cheaper — for both our capital providers and our customers.
We know the challenges facing us are more pressing and complex than ever. But by teaming up and dreaming bigger, we are seeing the shoots of growth and resilience all across our industry — and that leaves us thinking the world’s risks, complex as they are, will not stop us innovating and progressing as we have for centuries.
