London edges towards integrated IT.

(From Insurance Day)

Byline: Pat Talbot

IT would be unfair to say the London market has failed to embrace information technology. Each year companies in this market spend millions of pounds attempting to keep pace with the latest technological developments.

This amounts to a massive investment in new hardware, software and services all intended to make the transaction and processing of insurance and reinsurance business easier, quicker and cheaper.

Sadly, very little of this investment has been sensibly co-ordinated to enhance the interface and interaction between individual participants in the market.

Too many companies have ploughed ahead regardless with their own independent IT visions in an attempt to gain competitive advantage over their peers. The result is a market where companies find themselves at widely varying stages of technological development. There is a continuing lack of common IT standards in London today the only exception being the message structures that pass between "the bureau" Xchanging Ins-sure Services and each member participant and a plethora of technology-related issues that make it extremely difficult to centralise the market's business processes.

A lack of progress on improving working practices and efficiency has begun to erode the good reputation traditionally enjoyed by the London market based on its core strengths of market knowledge, entrepreneurialism and underwriting flair.