AIG's Anthony Baldwin on improving PPL

The struggles made by the wholesale insurance market to embrace digitalisation and abandon its reliance on paper are well recorded. It has been a long battle and the results so far have at best been uneven. But this summer – as well as having totally atypical English weather – I believe we have seen a turning of that tide and positive signals that the market is embracing new ways of working.

In August, the London Market Group published data from insurers showing that 16% of risks across the market were being placed electronically on Placing Platform Limited. The financial lines market is placing about 60% of its business electronically and one insurer reported that three-quarters of its risks are placed this way. The market is aiming to get to 30% by the end of this year and 80% by December 2019. Brokers too are embracing the technology, with nearly 50 broking firms signed up.

There is undeniable momentum, and I am proud to say that AIG is an active part of the PPL community. As users of the platform, we understand that it is not perfect. It is still mostly a standalone system, not integrated into brokers’ and underwriters’ back offices. It is also still being used primarily at bind and not at quote and submission. So the life of the individual underwriter or broker is probably not improved significantly today by using electronic placement. But the collective good certainly is.

Operations staff in each of the businesses that use PPL can drive downstream efficiency. Those businesses also get the critical structured data at the end of the processes by getting the right data into the system at the front end through PPL. Compliance is also simpler, swathes of administration and paper are removed and ultimately, cost and complexity are disappearing.

Every technology journey has to start somewhere. The first mobile phone with its brick line construction was a million miles away from the smartphone, online banking at inception was a shadow of what it is today and even iPads have evolved significantly. PPL must improve but, as with all things, it is the user experience that will inform that journey. Which is why building critical mass in electronic placement is so vital in the coming months.

We need people to turn up and embrace PPL, for brokers and underwriters to continue to contribute to the process of identifying the ongoing improvements it needs. In the two years that the platform has been live, it has been transformed and in the next two years it will be unrecognisable again. It is only when people are using it every day as part of their working life that they can engage in making it better, and, therefore, making the London Market an easier place to do business.

In a world where drones are delivering parcels and robots are performing surgery, our customers need us to make our market fit for the future. We have been keen digital developers for a number of years, producing advances such as an app to replace the old travel cards for business travellers, meaning medical assistance is now available at the simple touch of a button, along with useful tools like a medicine translator. The technology is there, and we are harnessing it to improve the customer experience.

London has a 300-year record of adapting and evolving, and we are market leaders in terms of product coverage and innovation. This concentration of expertise can surely harness the intellectual firepower to adopt new working practices, to make our market’s processes as good as its products and not be afraid to make mistakes – it is how we learn and improve. Our future will absolutely be determined by those who show up.