The next phase of the London Market’s electronic placement platform has been further delayed, this time to February of next year.
According to a new note, Placing Platform Ltd (PPL) is still finalising the commercial details of plans with Deloitte, and these are expected to be completed satisfactorily in the next fortnight. Detailed plans on migration to NextGen 1.0 in February 2023 will be developed after market consultation during Q4 2022.
The firm also said that in February next year, PPL will also publish detailed technical specifications for the API’s needed to support placement and firm order. It also said that NextGen 2.0, which will be made available to the market in June/July 2023, will incorporate these API’s together with usability improvements agreed with the PPL Market User & Ops Committee.
In December of last year, Bronek Masojada, Chair of the PPL Board, said that the delivery of the next generation of the platform would be in 2022. But this had slipped, by May 2022, to September.
As we reported in March, PPL usage was robust in 2021 ahead of the expected introduction of Next Gen, with the platform reporting a 17% rise in the number of risks bound when compared with the previous year, with risks bound moving from 160,346 in 2020 to 187,374 in 2021.
In addition, PPL has said it is enhancing its SteerCo Oversight Committee. The current SteerCo will be expanded to include not only PPL NEDs Theo Butt (Convex), Bob James (Lloyd’s), Justin Emrich (Atrium) and Matt Unsworth (Aon) but also Deloitte representatives and the PPL Executive team led by Sue Jakobek. It will have an independent Chair.
Separately in Q3/Q4 2022 work will begin on developing a road map for aligning PPL with F@L and the work of the Data Council. This alignment work will set out the path to capturing the data fields set out in the recently published Core Data Record. This work will be conducted by a team from Deloitte. It is expected that this work will set the agenda for PPL in 2023.
Sue Jakobek, CEO of PPL, will be retiring in December 2022. She will be succeeded by Joe Gordon, COO of QBE International, following his retirement from QBE. Joe has agreed to take this role for a 12-month period. He will also serve as the Independent Chair of the Oversight SteerCo and will oversee the development of the alignment roadmap by Deloitte.
