We’ve been hearing a lot recently about how Lloyd’s of London is looking to harness innovation across many areas to expand the range of insurance it can cover, improve efficiency and find new ways to measure and reduce risk.
The Lloyd’s Lab has become an important part of identifying companies that can help Lloyd’s and the managing agents writing business there.
In previous podcasts we’ve spoken to founders from companies that have taken part in one of the three cohorts. For this episode Matthew talks to Trevor Maynard, the person responsible for the Lab and overseeing innovation across Lloyd’s, about what the Lab offers and the other initiatives he is leading.
Topics include:
- How the ten-week cohorts are structured
- Why and when Lloyd’s selects start-ups, scale-ups and mature companies
- The role of mentors from managing agents and the benefits of getting this direct access to the market
- The link between the Lab and the Future of Lloyd’s programme
- Building an innovation culture
- Horizon scanning and the Lloyd’s Product Innovation Facility
You can hear our discussions with previous members of the Lloyd’s Lab that have participated in past cohorts in previous episodes: Oasis (32), Describe Data (40), Phinsys (45), Hyperexponential (52) and Praedicat (57).
The horizon scanning reports mentioned in the podcast are available from https://www.lloyds.com/news-and-risk-insight/risk-reports. All the information about the Lloyd’s Lab is available at https://www.lloydslab.com/.
We’ll have more from the Lloyd’s Lab in 2020, include a full evening hosted in collaboration with Trevor and his team. Keep up-to-date with all the latest news and views from us by taking a look at the regular updates of future and past events here on our website – and signing up for our InsTech newsletter.
Episode 59 of the podcast is available now from iTunes, Spotify and Podbean.
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Transcript for this podcast
00:00 Trevor Maynard: I think parametric products are a great way forward to test a whole number of different hard-to-insure areas, like reputation risk, and supply chains, and political risks in difficult areas. There’s a whole bunch of things you could do with them.
[music]
00:19 Matthew Grant: Hello, Matthew Grant here. Welcome to the InsTech London podcast. Now, Lloyd’s of London is one of the oldest insurance institutions in the world, and for anyone interested in innovation, it has a fascinating history of using the latest techniques to assess risk. It’s often able and willing to provide insurance for coverage that others wouldn’t or couldn’t. The Lloyd’s Lab recently celebrated the success of its third cohort, and if you’re a regular listener, you’ll have heard my interviews with a number of the companies that have been part of the Lab, and all of them have been very pleased with their experience. So for this episode, I was delighted to spend some time with Trevor Maynard, who is Head of Innovation at Lloyd’s. Trevor’s responsibilities include the Lloyd’s Lab and the recently launched Product Innovation Facility.
01:02 MG: Trevor’s team also publish risk insight reports exploring future trends and opportunities for insurance and innovations. Take a look at the episode notes for the link to download those. If you’re wondering what goes on in the Lab, how to apply, and what the benefits are, as well as the description of the Product Innovation Facility, well, keep listening. And that’s not all, you can listen to our podcast wherever you are, without fear of missing out on all the great information people share with us, because we’re now publishing a transcript of this, and most of our interviews, on the website. And also, look out for the articles of the interviews that we have coming up soon. All of this at www.instech.london.
01:49 MG: Well, Trevor, it’s great to be back in the Lab, I came along last night to the end of Cohort Three, and it was a tremendous party, and I think the good news was, all the enthusiasm I’ve heard from people along the way, it was still there at the end. You trained in statistics, got a PhD, and then joined Lloyd’s back in 2005. You’ve seen various roles there, looking after emerging risks, Head of Exposure Management, and now you are Head of Innovation for, I think it was a new role at Lloyd’s, this Head of Innovation, Is that right?
02:18 TM: Yeah, that was a new role in January 2017.
02:21 MG: How do you describe what your responsibilities are?
02:25 TM: Yeah, I guess the key responsibility is around stimulating an innovation culture, and we have a couple of key things there. We’ve got the Lloyd’s Lab, which is a kind of accelerator which brings the market together with start-ups, and we also have the Thought Leadership Function, which is all about Horizon Scanning, what the insurance industry of the future needs to be, and we’ve also created something called the Product Innovation Facility, now working with the market. So it’s all about stimulating innovation in insurance.
02:58 MG: Good. Well, I’ll come back to that, the Product Innovation Facility, in a minute, but just starting off first of all with the Lab. So this is the third cohort that finished now. What’s your impressions of how that went?
03:11 TM: I’m really delighted by it. I think it was different in the sense that we targeted slightly later-stage companies deliberately, because we wanted it to be in parallel with the Future at Lloyd’s. And so, the Future at Lloyd’s prospectus, you’ll remember came out in April, and set out some aims and objectives, and then the blueprint came out in September. And so, we targeted Cohort Three to be responding to some of those challenges in the prospectus. So it was very successful, really delighted with how it turned out. There was some really interesting proofs of concept that they did with different managing agents, and yesterday we had Demo Day and they took us through everything they’ve achieved, which I was really delighted by.
03:57 MG: Yeah, and it sounds like this focused period of time gives people a chance to be able to come up with some goals, get some help in the market, and then deliver on that towards the end. So certainly when you were talking about it yesterday, it sounded like you had some very specific outcomes for some of the companies that came through.
04:12 TM: Absolutely, yeah. It’s a 10-week programme, which some people have sometimes said feels quite short, but actually it does focus the mind. It means that the mentors, from the managing agents, know that they’re in for a finite period, it’s not gonna be an endless, kind of working with us endlessly, which is good, and it focuses the minds of the start-ups themselves. Yeah, an example, we had ClimaCell. They have produced an app which uses their weather forecasting and works, and they’re working with a managing agent in Future in one of their product lines, to try and bring that weather forecasting into their day-to-day underwriting process. That was pretty exciting. I think HX is a great example. They were bringing a system to try and formalise actuarial pricing, and they’ve done three proofs of concept whilst they were in the Lab. They set out to do one, but they had such great mentors, they were able to do three. And they were able to cut the time it took to bring new products to market, really, really quickly. So that was very good, and there’s lots of other examples.
05:14 MG: I had a great discussion with Amrit on one of the earlier podcasts, and it was good to see he was as enthusiastic yesterday as he was when I spoke to him halfway through, and yeah, no surprise that he’s ended up with three times as many results as he was originally planning to do. You mentioned there that the way you’re approaching it this time is to go for slightly more established companies as part of the Future of Lloyd’s. Is that, as you sort of look forward to the balance between the early-stage start-ups and the more established companies, Do you have a sort of view as to what’s gonna happen next with the future cohorts?
05:45 TM: We’re literally thinking about that right now, what Cohort Four will be. We’ve decided it’s gonna start at the end of April next year, which is the same time that Cohort Two started. We are quite open-minded at this stage about what the cohort should be about. I think that the later-stage company approach has worked well, in the sense that they had products to offer to the market, and they could pivot them slightly, but they had a real solid core of things already developed. But I have a view as well, that early stage is still really important, because if you want to really try something very new, then you’re gonna need to be in at the beginning and watch it grow. So I’d like to think that we can continue with a mix, but we’re gonna think about that as time goes past.
06:29 MG: And with the engagement for the market, I guess one of the tests of these types of things is, once you get past the initial excitement and people wanting to get engaged, and you run your mentor programme, Are you still seeing quite a lot of people willing to commit time and work with the organisations that you’ve got coming through?
06:44 TM: Very much, it’s been great. The mentors this year, this cohort we had, I think it was around about 60, from 24 managing agents. So a very large proportion of the market, making people available, and really enthusiastically taking part. And what was really good was that they were clearly having strategic conversations with their firms about how to embed the technology. So it wasn’t as if it was play-time, it was proper commercial activity, and they were trying to think how they could embed it in their company. So yeah, I’d say the support, if anything, has strengthened over the three cohorts, which is really great, actually, ’cause people always get excited when something new happens, and then it can dwindle, but so far it’s, if anything, strengthened.
07:26 MG: So the mentors that come through, are they… Do they tend to just do it on their own initiative? Or is it… Do you find organisations are looking at what you’re doing, the managing agents, and saying, “Right, we want to be part of this.” And then they go and they themselves are being mentors as an organisation, or is it more just driven by individuals who just take the initiative themselves to get involved?
07:44 TM: I think it’s a bit of both. I think… So when we asked the question, at Pitch Day, we actually asked the question, “Are you willing to mentor?” And originally, we also asked a question, which was, “Do you have company support?” ‘Cause we wanted precisely to test whether it was sort of innovation hobbyists, who I absolutely love, but may not be plugged in strategically, or was it with the backing of the company? But I think now we’re… It’s so obviously got the backing of the companies, that we don’t ask that question now. But that said, you do still have real enthusiasts that keep coming back time and again. Several people will sit through all of Demo Day, for example, because they want to see all of it. So it’s a balance, but the one thing I will say is, unless we have the strategic support from the companies themselves, then it won’t go anywhere, and I’m glad to say we’ve got it.
08:32 MG: One of the things we’ve talked about before is that balance between the people who are maybe in the mid level in the organisation, who are really keen on making a difference and got some ideas, and how do they bring those ideas into the organisation. I guess this is a good way of bringing, giving them something to actually engage with, and they bring back to their own companies. No, it’s been impressive, and I’ve heard that from a number of the people on here as well, is how much value they’ve got from the mentors. And I think that even a couple of them have actually managed to start getting some commercial discussions going, just in the periods they’ve been here. So for anybody that’s looking at the Lab and what the experience looks like, Can you just talk through what happens over those 10 weeks?
09:08 TM: Maybe I’ll start with when they… Right from the point at which they apply. So L Marks, who we’re working with, is a company that scouts, and so they’ll often get a call from L Marks saying, “Lloyd’s Lab is doing another cohort. We think what your company offers could be interesting. Would you like to apply?” And then they fill in a pretty brief form, to be honest. We review those. So the first couple of cohorts, we got about 200 applications. Because we went later stage this time, it narrowed the field a little bit, we got 130, so that’s still very good. And we narrow those down internally, with some market input as well, to make sure that we get a good bunch of people along to what we call Pitch Day. So Pitch Day is where we invite in around about 24 companies to present, either face-to-face or over Skype. Some of them are overseas, and so obviously we make it a little bit less costly for them by allowing the Skype option.
10:00 TM: And then, there’s an audience there of the market who will be judging those pitches, and they have a voting app, which L Marks provides as well, and we ask questions like, “What do you think of the calibre of the management team of the company? Would you work with them in the syndicate? We’ll let you know.” That sort of question, and also, crucially, “Would you be willing to mentor?” And, “Would you be willing to share data with them?” Because we’ve found that, again, if people aren’t willing to actually come, step forward, then their vote is, in a sense, worthless. So then, at the end of the day, we will take all those votes and we’ll figure out who the most popular ones were, and invite around about 10, this time it was 13, in for the 10 weeks. And then how the 10 weeks works, is they start on day one, they get a bit of an introduction into how the Lloyd’s market functions. They don’t always know that, we’re quite complicated, as you all know. And then they get a few more things, they get told about how the Future at Lloyd’s is working, and all of those things.
10:56 TM: And then we set up the mentor meetings for them, and that’s been one of the key things that they’ve commented on, is the value, is that they get multiple mentors, so it’s not just one company, it’s multiple companies. And then, they have a series of mentor meetings. We have something called Mid-Point Review, where we just basically see if there’s any road blocks on any issues, and it gets them starting to think about Demo Day, because that comes along really quickly, 10 weeks isn’t very long. And we start saying, “What are you gonna announce?” And that kind of thing, gets them thinking. And then really, it’s a question of more mentor meetings, developing their products, and then Demo Day is where they tell us what they did.
11:31 MG: And you’ve got a slightly unique model, something L Marks I know do, or help build accelerators, and innovation labs, and things across multiple industries, but the access to market is pretty unique in terms of what you’ve got here. How do you balance giving people the freedom to develop relationships and then go off and just deliver it themselves, versus you’re coaching them, putting them through very specific programmes about how to build the company? That’s quite… Every organisation is gonna be in a slightly different place, and needs slightly different things. How do you handle that desire and need for freedom, versus some structure around the 10 weeks?
12:10 TM: For me, the key outcome is that there are meaningful commercial conversations that lead to actual, either products, or licensing services, or perhaps investment. So that’s our ultimate aim, and it doesn’t really matter how you get there. So we’ve deliberately tried not to over-structure it. For example, some companies are interested in investment when they come in, but we haven’t insisted on that, because that would preclude a whole raft of further developed companies that wouldn’t be looking for that. We’ve got no real sense of scale either, in the sense, you know, we had Experian in the Lab this time, a very large company, with a whole raft of data analysis skills, all the way down to, in the past, we’ve had people who started out with more or less, a blank piece of paper. So I think we are quite keen too, that they do retain that freedom actually, and that they can go and form the conversations with the managing agents, as they wish. And we would like to bring things together, if it helps, and do some sort of central coordination, but I wouldn’t want that to get in the way of them creating those links.
13:16 MG: You mentioned investment in there, and there’s an announcement that Lloyd’s had invested in Layr, one of the companies that came through the previous cohorts. Is that a specific part of what you’re doing with the Lab? Have you got a separate investment fund there, or How does that overall relationship work? In terms of funds being invested in companies.
13:36 TM: We invested in Layr and there was always an aspect to the Lab where we would have the potential to look at investment and that would be, of course, if the company wanted it, and at the same time, if it was of interest to us. The investment isn’t the main reason for the Lab though. So we don’t have a large investment fund, there is money to invest, but it’s not the key purpose of the Lab. But in that case, we thought it was a very interesting company, and they’re trying to do something really interesting in distribution for small enterprises in the US, and really exploring kind of frictionless underwriting, which I think is great when you’ve got a very low-margin part of the business, the only way to keep involved in it is to find ways of saving as many costs as possible, and they were doing things like interfacing with cloud accounting systems so people didn’t need to fill in forms, and using AI to do recommendations of what to buy, which for those small companies that are wanting to pay as little as possible, that’s really the only way, I would say. So it was a pretty interesting concept.
14:42 MG: I guess a good link into the whole Future of Lloyd’s and some of the things laid out in Blueprint One, that we’ll come to in a minute, but just so back on that investment. So is there a separate fund that Lloyd’s is running, that’s looking for opportunities to invest? Or is this more like a seed funding, where an individual company might need it, but you’re not necessarily trying to also run a fund and make money from a fund?
15:05 TM: The investment would be done on strategic purposes. We were clear that it wasn’t about the making-money side of the investment at that stage, it was about the stimulating the innovation. Obviously, Future at Lloyd’s is itself a big programme, but we are still, in principle, looking at companies in that context, and I think over the coming months, as the Future at Lloyd’s becomes clearer and our service hub approach, it becomes clearer as well, then that aspect may evolve, but at the moment that’s where we are.
15:34 MG: Okay. And so, just to help set expectations of, to maybe avoid you getting hundreds of emails, people looking for funding, Is that funding from Lloyd’s only for companies going through the cohorts? Or is it… Are you also looking at companies outside of your cohorts to provide funding to?
15:48 TM: At the moment, it’s just people coming through the cohorts. I suppose whenever I’m asked that sort of question, I think, well if the most amazing company came forward and looked really exciting, then I’d like to think we could make a business case for it. So you know, which probably doesn’t help me with the emails, Does it? [chuckle]
16:04 MG: We’ll see what happens. It might be a good loop-back into selecting companies for the Lab. So just talking a bit about that, so not surprisingly, ’cause there is lots of good feedback coming out of the companies that have been part of this and actually the mentors as well. So I’ve been approached by a big number of people who have asked me, how they actually get onto the Lab. You mentioned that L Marks do the scouting, But can people also apply to be part of the Lab, even if they don’t get an email from L Marks asking them to apply?
16:32 TM: Yeah, definitely. So once we open up a cohort, then there’s a link on lloydslab.com which tells them how to apply, and it will take them to that L Marks app. So you don’t have to wait for a phone call, that’s absolutely right.
16:44 MG: Good, okay. And then, so Future of Lloyd’s. So I guess the interesting thing was, as the Future of Lloyd’s is being developed, you had the prospectus initially, earlier this year, and then Blueprint One came out a few weeks ago. I assume they had been working very closely with you. This very much a sort of practical experience of what you’d seen through the Lab, and also more generally about what’s used in Lloyd’s. Was that a big part of what you were doing and were the people, the part of the cohorts, engaging specifically with the people developing the Future of Lloyd’s?
17:15 TM: So this time, this cohort was aimed at Future at Lloyd’s and so what we made sure was that there was a Future at Lloyd’s mentor, effectively, for each team. So throughout the cohort there’s been lots of conversations in that respect. They’re now fully aware of what capabilities those teams have, as they continue to think through what the blueprint’s gonna look like in practice.
17:35 MG: There must have been some level of success overall, ’cause I noticed that actually, one of the outcomes from Blueprint One was doing more through the Lloyd’s Lab. So it sounds like you might be doing more cohorts, bigger cohorts, different cohorts. Or is that still too early to say?
17:50 TM: So as you say, in Blueprint One it talks about expanding the Lab and there’s lots of ideas of things that we could do, ranging from a kind of accelerated cohort, which is an idea of starting with earlier stage and trying to give them longer to develop things, but they’re all, at the moment, things for us to consider, we haven’t decided yet what we’re gonna do.
18:09 MG: Well done as well, because that wouldn’t be in there if it wasn’t real. And just coming back to that point about data, so one of the issues people often bring up is if their buildings, well, two things really. One is their building solutions and testing them out, but also actually, they want to roll them out into the real world. Is this access to data, and understandably many insurance companies are very careful about who gets access to their data, they might provide a sandbox in it, but is that one of the areas you’ve seen success through the work you’ve done, which is creating more ways for companies to work with either the market generally, or with individual companies to get access to data, both for testing and actually, ultimately to use as part of the analytics?
18:49 TM: Yeah, we have seen some success there. It’s very important with… Data is being seen now as a strategic asset, as it should, which is great news, which obviously means people are cautious and thoughtful about what they can share. But as an example, Insurdata that came along to the Lab this time, through our Exposure Management team, they were able to get access to, I think it was 26,000 policy location details, which they were able to then run through their systems to see if they could improve the accuracy of that. So that’s a great example where they had a need, and because of having the right contacts, we were able to supply, across a whole load of different managing agents, examples of data. So we have had some success, we also do still find though, that there are times when the conversations are difficult, and I think that’s an area for the market to start evolving their thinking around what can be shared, and actually, you might be better off sharing limited amounts of data to develop something in the future, than holding onto it yourself and maybe doing nothing with it. So it’s kind of a balance, and I’d like to see that evolve personally.
19:57 MG: Well, I’d just like to switch to that other, I guess the other main area of responsibility, but also it’d just be good to talk about everything else you’re doing under Innovation, which is the Product Innovation Facility. I had the chance to be here when you were launching, I think it was the first client, which is Marriott Hotels, with their… Which is very interesting, because it was a parametric or an index-based cover. Interesting for lots of reasons I think, and a sort of, definitely part of what is in the Future of Lloyd’s, and generally people are looking at more ways to be able to access analytics more quickly, get claims paid more quickly. But also one of the things that was very notable about it was, as a reminder of how rarely we actually see the end client coming and talking about what their problems are.
20:41 TM: As part of our work on innovation culture, we looked at barriers to innovation, and we spoke to the market about, “Were there any issues that were getting in the way of innovating product?” And what we came to the conclusion of, was that it would be helpful to get some steer from Lloyd’s on the fact that we were in fact very pro-innovation. And so, we first did an online tool called the Market Innovation Guide, which came out last year. And then, the conversations continued, and off the back of that, this Product Innovation Facility was launched. It started out as 12 managing agents and 53 million of capacity, and that was a, you know, I have to shout out Tom Hoad here, he did an incredible job going round the market, effectively broke in the concept. And it was done as a slip, and they all put their stamps on it as a kind of non-binding agreement. But it really solidified into something real. And then, it launched in June, and we actually, within about two or three weeks, had another 12 managing agents saying, “Well, you know, this is… This sounds really good. Can we join?” And so, we’re now up to 25 and 118 million of capacity, to try product innovation experiments.
22:00 MG: Are there more opportunities out there beyond the first one with Marriott, that are coming into the market and being directed towards the PIF?
22:05 TM: Yes. So there’s a couple of more live ones that they’re looking at, but there’s also, if you do Product Innovation Facility and Lloyd’s of London in Google, you’ll get to the landing page, which means there’s a form you can fill in. So if you’ve got… If you’re a broker, for example, and you don’t know how to get a new innovative idea into the market, then this way, you will get that idea in front of 24 people reviewing it, 25, sorry. Or in fact, you could be a customer that just simply wants insurance for something, and doesn’t know if it can be bought, and sometimes we can refer you and say you can already buy that, and other times it stimulates the thinking. So yeah, there’s quite a few ideas in the pipeline.
22:46 MG: Good, and actually that whole area of indices, given that is a sort of pretty critical for parametric covers, is that something that you’re seeing as a kind of unique aspect of what you’re doing? Either in the lab or elsewhere, through innovations, and looking for indices you can develop, or ones that you can use that are elsewhere outside of the insurance industry, but could have applications for being used to define when a loss occurs.
23:10 TM: I think that parametric products are critical for the future of the insurance industry, and when you look at the areas of insurance that people have pointed out, we are not providing a lot of coverage for at the moment, then, often the reason for that is that they’re quite hard to underwrite, as areas. And I think parametric products give you the chance to do safe experiments, because they test the frequency, but they don’t test the severity, in the sense that you know exactly what you’re gonna pay out once the index triggers. Whereas otherwise, you might have a very large claim, and you hadn’t expected it to be that large. So I think parametric products are a great way forward to test a whole number of different hard-to-insure areas, like reputation risk, and supply chains, and political risks in difficult areas. There’s a whole bunch of things you could do with them.
24:00 MG: Practically all of those, I think, are the intangible, the tangible risks where people are finding it hard to decide whether or not to determine a loss has occurred, it’s hard to price it, and there’s obviously still a big gap, or an emerging, an increasing gap there for coverage. Is there anything else… You’ve got probably enough there to probably keep three people fully engaged, but in terms of your role as Innovation, so you’ve got the Lab, you’ve got the PIF. You also, I think you commissioned some research as well, into areas that are of interest to people in the market and beyond.
24:29 TM: Yeah, so in a sense, the beginning of the team was to take the Horizon Scanning team at Lloyd’s and convert it over to the Innovation team, which we did in 2017. And yes, we’re still carrying out that activity and producing thought leadership research, but now with a strong focus on product innovation. So the idea is, although we might be finding new risks, those are opportunities for the insurance industry. So you’ve mentioned intangibles, and that will be our next big campaign, is to look at intangibles in detail. Reputation, IP, and others. And explore what the product opportunities are there. And in fact, the great thing is the Product Innovation Facility has agreed to work hand-in-hand with that thought leadership work. So we’ve now joined the two pieces together, which I’m very excited about. That’s a great new step forward for us.
25:16 MG: And those Horizon Scanning reports, they’re available to anybody to read. Is that right? You have them on the Lloyd’s website.
25:21 TM: Yeah, lloyds.com/riskreports will get you to them, and they’re all freely available.
25:25 MG: Okay. And then, just in terms of your own personal ways that you acquire knowledge, when you’ve got an almost infinite world here in terms of types of insurance, innovation, access to the market. How do you just manage and be effective about how you’re acquiring information yourself?
25:41 TM: I’m lucky in having a very long and boring commute. So this gives me lots of time to think about and read things, I did my PhD on the train, in fact. We are very lucky in the sense that we work with expert partners for all our thought leadership, so we will find real world leaders in a subject, and they can teach us what it’s about. So rather than trying to do too much research that might be going off in the wrong directions, we just find the experts in the world and then learn from them. That’s been very effective. But yeah, these days, there’s so much you can learn online, things like Kaggle, is a great thing to look at. I’ve done a few of their online data science courses and things like that. It’s endless what you can do these days.
26:26 MG: Yeah. Did you win any prizes from the Kaggle competitions? Or have you not gone as far as doing the…
26:30 TM: I haven’t won anything yet, but I was most put out to be a Novice, and I was determined not to be one, so I did enough to be a Contributor. So I’ve got my badge now.
26:41 MG: If you’re a novice, then that doesn’t leave much hope for the rest of us. Good, and then actually when I saw you a couple of weeks ago, you were reading the book Beyond the Idea, about innovation, which you recommended very highly, but I’d be interested in a couple words on that as well, about…
26:54 TM: Yeah, it’s a great book, because it’s clearly written by people that have tried to do innovation in large firms, and have got the scars. And what they basically point out, is that a firm needs to be split into two parts. There’s the production engine, which does all the business-as-usual stuff. But if you don’t think of innovation differently, and think of them as a series of experiments and give objectives that are set in a different way, then you’re gonna fail those, and they list all the different ways organisations will smother innovation. So if you wanna avoid that, it’s a great book to read, ’cause it gives you some hints and tips on what to do to avoid it. And I found it very inspiring, and I also recognized everything in it.
27:35 MG: It’s a big challenge for every insurance organisation, is how to balance that innovation and particularly, you alluded to it earlier on as we were talking about the mentors, but doing the day job for people where they’ve got short-term metrics, and in many cases things work okay, it’s just making that step away from the day job and figuring out how to do things differently, and maybe taking some risks. Very hard to do unless you’ve got an organisation that really recognizes that and supports it, and I think that’s still the challenge across all insurance companies, is how to make a big change as opposed to just incremental tweaks on the innovation side. So Trevor, you’ve already got a lot going on in terms of what you’re doing here, and I think some quite exciting things coming up next, But what should people be looking out for, either with what you’re doing here in the Lab or more generally across Lloyd’s?
28:21 TM: Yeah, I would say in the short-term, look out for some more thought leadership work. We have a really interesting report on the new space economy, looking at things like what SpaceX is doing, and space tourism, etcetera. And we also have a piece coming out next year called Maturing Metropolis, which is on future cities and how their insurance needs will change. So there’s a lot of good thought leadership coming in the future.
28:45 MG: Good. Does that mean there might be a chance to see Elon Musk in the Lab at some point, in the next 12 months?
28:50 TM: Well, we could only hope.
28:51 MG: Good, okay. Well Trevor, thank you very much for carving some time out. I’m not gonna suggest you’re gonna take a rest after the last cohort, but I’m sure you must be glad of the chance just to clear your head a bit, and get ready for the end of the year, and into next year. Thank you very much.
29:03 TM: It’s a pleasure, thanks.
29:08 MG: If you want to hear more from the Lab, look out for the past episodes with interviews with Oasis, Phinsys, Describe Data, Hyperexponential and Praedicat. And we’ll have more in the future, I’m sure. So if you enjoyed this, please feel free to rate us on your podcast app, and of course, to find out more about what we’re up to, take a look at www.instech.london
Listen here to podcast 59. It is also available on iTunes, Spotify and Podbean.
Continuing Professional Development
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