Lloyds aims to save £800m with shift to the cloud, contracts DXC Technology

Everything coming off mainframes, paper in ambitious digital transformation effort

Lloyds aims to save £800m with shift to the cloud, contracts DXC Technology

Insurance marketplace Lloyd’s has embarked on a hugely ambitious digital transformation effort that will see migrate core applications off mainframe and onto the cloud – and bring thousands of paper-based processes into the digital era, with Lloyd’s this week revealing it had selected DXC Technology as lead IT provider and SI.

Lloyd’s comprises 50 leading insurance companies that collectively wrote over £35 billion of gross premiums in the year ending March 2021.  Its network also includes 200+ registered Lloyd’s brokers and 4,000+ local cover-holders. The digital transformation effort, dubbed “Future at Llloyd’s”, will save it an estimated £800 million in operating costs for brokers, underwriters and business partners, according to its last annual report.

Lloyd’s hires DXC to lead modernisation effort

As lead IT provider and systems integrator, DXC Technology will engage a number of partners, a spokesperson told The Stack. The primary cloud provider will be AWS, which will support containerised application components (AWS EKS) as well as a data reporting and analytics platform and other services.  Other partners include Red Hat (which will power workflow and rule management tooling), Micro Focus (test automation, optimisation and virtualisation tools), ACORD (an insurance industry standard messaging solutions) and several others.

For DXC, the core work will be in digitalising/modernising core business applications and supporting products as well establishing a platform for hosting digital, cloud native applications, frameworks and tools to accelerate application development and advanced monitoring tools and service management tools. This will comprise over 100 business applications across premiums, claims and settlement services. These in turn consume a set of supporting services that provide functions such as risk management, document management, party management, query management, notification services and reference data management, the company said.

Follow The Stack on LinkedIn to stay abreast

Lloyd’s CEO John Neal said in a January 12, 2021 press release: “[With the team in place] we have the capabilities to transition to a single platform solution that will provide automated processing and accounting for the market, a substantial reduction in operating costs, and offer customers a much faster, better service.”

“This new digital platform will fundamentally change the operating model of the London market,” said Mike Salvino, President and CEO, DXC Technology in a canned statement. He added: “We are proud that DXC has been entrusted with a transformation of such unprecedented scale and importance. It’s the definition of ‘mission critical’ and an opportunity for us to apply our deep industry and technology expertise.”

The Lloyd's DXC deal is a hugely strategic deal for all parties and represents a potentially huge shift from BAU across the London insurance market. Lloyd's represents 7.6% of the global commercial (re)insurance market, employs 47,000 people across the UK, and the industry makes up almost a quarter of the City of London’s GDP.

The vision, ultimately: “The Future at Lloyd’s will be digital from start to finish, providing a highly intuitive user experience with data at its core” the marketplace says, adding that “complete and accurate data at the point insurance transactions are entered into will unlock a myriad of benefits for policyholders, brokers and insurers.”

See also: Zurich UK’s Head of DevOps on low-code, shadow IT, and in-sourcing