A consortium of insurance entities including AXA XL, Neon, MS Amlin, RFIB Group, and Antares has formed to test a new platform created by London-based software company Whitespace.
Whitespace has built a fully-digital mobile and desktop platform to negotiate, quote and place insurance risks.
Since April this consortium have engaged with the company in an extended Proof of Concept (PoC) to examine the viability of their digital platform.
Recently, Whitespace gained conditional recognition from Lloyd’s for electronic placement, working with mid-tier organisations and/or discrete teams in larger organisations.
Thus all risks placed using the Whitespace platform will count towards the electronic placing targets set by Lloyd’s.
The Whitespace product turns Market Reform Contracts into a digital format at their point of creation and offers a distributed platform that allows brokers and underwriters to interact, collaborate, negotiate and bind risks.
The digital slips look exactly like they do in paper form but are no longer documents, and the interaction between brokers and underwriters reflects the current face to face process.
However because the process is digital it offers the potential for significant efficiency gains – and potential cost savings – over the current paper based process.
Whitespace says that the document transactions today require back and forth editing and then transcribing or using optical character recognition software to extract data into back office systems.
Therefore, having the whole contract in digital form from the outset means negotiating changes is done in real-time and contract terms are available for downstream processing without any further effort.
