The 330-year-old Lloyd’s insurance marketplace has created a new insurtech lab, Lloyd’s Lab. The selection process whittled 200 applications from 36 countries down to twenty. Earlier this week, those twenty teams pitched their projects at an event attended by Lloyd’s CEO Inga Beale, and the UK’s Economic Secretary to the Treasury, John Glen MP. One of the selected companies, BelMead Tech, is a blockchain startup.
The purpose of the Lab is to develop products, platforms, and processes to help transform Lloyds given that the insurance market is increasingly technology driven.
Insurance claims are very costly to process and involve much data sharing. BellMead Tech has a claims support platform that uses blockchain and other technologies. They aim to improve the process for the claimant and also make it more efficient for the claims handling team.
The other winning groups included some interesting non-blockchain applications. For example, Qnity lets users design their own insurance solutions. Parsyl is a supply chain data platform that uses sensors to help insurers to assess risk and improve the claims process.
The Lab runs for ten weeks from 8 October. Later this year applications will open for a second group that will start in early 2019. In addition to access to the Lloyds market, the selected teams have working space in the Lloyd’s building, potential funding, and the insight and expertise from marketplace members.
John Glen, Economic Secretary to the Treasury, said: “InsurTech is booming. There was $724m of InsurTech investment globally in the first quarter of 2018 and the UK attracted 12% of that funding, placing it second only behind the US. We’re doing everything we can to maintain this momentum and cultivate innovation in the sector, but ultimately, it is down to firms like Lloyd’s to take the lead, and that’s exactly what they’re doing with their Lab.”
