Specialist, high-impact and agile consulting.

By Mark Weller

insights

​Everything seems to be about optimisation at the moment. Across many different business sectors, and particularly in insurance, everywhere you go people are talking about workbenches.For organisations undergoing big implementation programmes to migrate several different tools and platforms to a single, unified platform, workbenches undoubtedly have their uses. However, the reality is that a process which is likely to cost a lot of money, and which can throw up multiple challenges around data migration and security(adding further development costs) will ultimately just result in changing the front end of your organisation’s system in order to create a better user experience.​I would question, therefore, whether some of the workbenches that businesses are implementing are really worth the investment in time and money. To my mind, the glaring omission from most of these projects is the consideration of the user journey and the user experience at the start of the process.​Don’t forget UX/UIThe user experience/user interface (UX/UI) aspect of workflows often gets missed in implementation processes, typically because organisations balk at the cost at the front end of the project to address UX/UI.​Inevitably, as costs build over the lifetime of a big-budget project, by the time the product owners get their shiny new front end and workbench, there’s little appetite to add further costs for re-designing the UX/UI.​But consider the consequences for business adoption across a global organisation planning to implement a new workbench across multiple countries. If the organisation hasn’t got the pilot right in its home country and is now attempting to roll it out to other territories, it could experience pushback from teams in other locations who are struggling to see any benefit in the new system - precisely because the user experience and interface hasn’t improved.​That kind of internal conflict can be costly. The original sign-off on investment in the new process and platform would have relied on its benefits being realised only if the programme is carried out at scale, with optimisation and consolidation across all areas of the business. Instead, what the organisation could end up with is a costly white elephant that nobody wants to implement.​​Effective optimisation​As business units from the front end to the back office increasingly become digitally enabled, the purpose of any optimisation programme is to give employees the right tools to do their jobs better. Making the user experience smoother and easier helps your workforce become more effective and enables different teams and offices to interact seamlessly. ​However, our view is that if organisations allocate more upfront investment to assessing the user experience, improving the interface, and training users to use it, they will ultimately deliver something to users that not only genuinely works better, but also supports what the business is trying to do.​Before embarking on a global IT programme to consolidate systems at a cost of tens of millions of pounds, therefore, organisations would do well to take a step back, map their current systems, and assess what they currently use and how successful the interface is, before considering what they really need from the programme and how it will benefit the user experience.​​Re-designing the front end​Spending more time focusing on the front end will involve more upfront investment. If organisations are not prepared to factor in those costs before launching into an implementation programme, they are likely to spend more money on the back end on remediation, testing and re-working. ​The pay-off is that re-designing the front end should make users more effective, due to the improved UK/UI, meaning they can spend more time working on things that add real value. And if your front office is more efficient, and is using data more effectively, that flows through the entire organisation, potentially leading to better strategic decisions. 

By Kevin Hall

insights

​In my last blog ‘Outsourcing: Has the pendulum swung too far?’, I suggested some organisations may have risked throwing the baby out with the bathwater by outsourcing and offshoring too many of their capabilities. ​However, through the use of emerging technologies to optimise their onshore capabilities, companies can potentially deploy their core resources much more efficiently going forward.For example, there is a well-established tradition of outsourcing app development to offshore teams. But as a coder friend of mine recently explained, by using a large language model such as ChatGPT to write code, he is able to reduce a 20-hour task to less than an hour. If he then spends, say, four hours optimising the code ChatGPT has produced, he will have realised a net gain of around 15 hours in time that would otherwise be spent on routine coding tasks.If you compare this to the outsourced model, it is unlikely that an offshore team will be motivated or even able to perform the same process in a quarter of the time. There is however, no reason why offshore teams can’t also use ChatGPT to develop code. So why not gain further savings? In short good practice uses a 'two-in-the-box' model for more effective outsourcing, where the service provider does the heavy lifting of writing code, and the onshore team devotes its time to rigorous code reviews. In this case, the marginal gains from an offshore model using Chat GPT would be more than outweighed by the process costs of a handoff.​Bringing it back onshoreViewed through this lens, there is a strong case to be made that one of the benefits of using technology to drive business optimisation is the potential to onshore or reshore some core functions back to the business, while still leveraging offshore capabilities to give the in-house team more time to focus on highly skilled work.Rather than abdicating responsibility and abandoning good governance, in using a tool like ChatGPTentities will be able to do more with the same in-house resources, while still employing an agile methodology.AI tools are only as ‘intelligent’ as the parameters set for their use. So while ChatGPT can rapidly structure what you might call the ‘known knowledge’ made available to it, it can’t create previously unknown knowledge. That's where human intervention is required, to move things forward through creative thought.​Driving creativityA good example of how this advanced processing is driving creativity in the wider world, is the use of AI to predict protein structures, which can then be combined to form new pharmaceutical compounds. These processes would ordinarily require many hours of manual work, but the timescale can be dramatically reduced using AI, at which point humans can apply their creative understanding to the output to generate real-world solutions in the form of new drugs.That’s where the power of AI as part of a business optimisation process lies – giving your team more time to spend being creative. Testing is one function that has been extensively offshored, using outsourced teams to produce the test scripts, which are then reviewed by an onshore test manager.The ability to carry out automated testing, using AI technology, also gives organisations a fantastic ability to do regression testing that fits with agile, continuous integration and development, the ability to deliver rapid releases of code, and the prospect of automated updating of tests, based on new features and functionality – typically a process that requires substantial investment in time and effort.​Skilling up for AIOptimising through AI is a challenge, and we need to be on top of the potential downsides – such as the fear that it may replace human jobs - but it also offers an opportunity to do significantly more with the same resources and maybe solve a good chunk of the UK's productivity challenge in the process.That said, the experience of the banking sector suggests the UK is currently falling behind in terms of the numbers of AI experts being able to drive digital transformation.Business leaders are going to have to re-think their approach to hiring as they look to optimise their businesses. In order to leverage the power of AI to drive the next generation of processes and practices, everybody from our coders and testers to programme managers and transformation directors needs to be aware of its capabilities. I believe a sea change is about to occur with AI, but for leaders of change initiatives to be able to bring together specialists with the right skill sets and the capabilities to deliver on transformation they need to be having a conversation, internally and with clients, about what technology-driven business optimisation involves in the age of AI.

By Paul Jardine

insights

​The sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), followed barely a week later by the decline of Credit Suisse Group, raised the ugly spectre of another banking crisis to rival the crash of 2008.The reasons behind the fall from grace for both banks differed, but they quickly sparked a rapid decline in rating agency and investor confidenceCredit Suisse was only saved by a rushed merger deal. SVB’s future looked more uncertain; its UK arm was quickly rescued by an acquisition deal with HSBC, but the bulk of its operations were left hanging in the breeze, until First Citizens BancShares stepped in over a fortnight later with a deal hammered out with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to acquire all of SVB’s deposits, loans and branches.The cause of SVB's collapse has multiple strands, but it is a sobering reminder of the interconnectedness of the financial world. That the 16th largest bank in the US can go bankrupt for want of a $2bn raise is quite scary. Coming less than six months after the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer’s disastrous ‘mini-budget’ threatened to crash pension funds when it caused excessive bond market volatility, these developments made me reflect on the potentially huge impact of the law of unintended consequences - and the correlations in the business world between companies’ assets and their liabilities. While the two may be matched, they are typically managed independently in terms of their risk exposure.That led in turn to a recollection of when, in the 1990s, I worked as a partner in an accounting firm. From year to year we would have an entire management and business structure focused on one product or industry and would then shift the focus of that structure to another area the year after, and so on.What inevitably happens if you keep shifting the focus of your business, however, is that you lose sight of what’s going on in the back office of your organisation. This can end up with your organisation accumulating an array of legacy IT systems, with employees in different departments calling data items by different names.You then face an uphill struggle in attempting to amalgamate all of the components of your business, making it more challenging to assess the likely impact of any seismic macroeconomic events on the overall business.That level of oversight requires robust IT architecture, a strong data management structure, and a clear ownership framework to enable business leaders to provide their board with decent management information and relevant KPIs that will allow them to determine the organisation’s level of resilience. Transforming the London marketFor many mature (re)insurance firms in the London market, some of whom may have been trading for several decades, the likelihood of accumulating legacy IT is high. At the same time, Lloyd's and the London (re)insurance market has something of a chequered history when it comes to major change programmes.But with data quality an increasingly important part of differentiating yourself in a crowded marketplace, a minimum requirement for any insurance business looking to make its structure more robust should be to ensure all its individual segments report in the same, consistent way.Furthermore, ensuring that the data acquired from clients and brokers is robust and accurate will enable companies to obtain real insights into the risks being acquired.Current initiatives for transforming the market –including Lloyd's Blueprint Two, market-wide standardisation of data, and the development of the Core Data Record–have the collective aim of helping businesses to create contracts with straight-through processing, that allow accounting settlement and tax reporting to be done effectively and seamlessly. While some commentators believe this is isn’t a true transformation programme, because it won’t necessarily change the customer journey, this is a necessary first step toward automating the back office. This will provide companies with a platform for automating the remainder of the broking and underwriting process, removing frictional costs, enhancing transaction speeds, and giving greater certainty to clients about coverage and claims. Going further, fasterThe key to market modernisation is going to be finding those businesses – whether brokers or carriers – who are prepared to stick their necks out, go as fast as they can, and who are then happy to share their experience.The advantage for those who get there faster is that they will have the ability to think more deeply about how to leverage third party data to get further insights and create more customer-centric services based on that data. In many lines of business that could be the difference between winning and losing.However, the reality for many businesses in the London market is a heavy reliance on outsourced IT services - especially when you consider that in the smaller broker community the majority of organisations outside of the top Lloyd’s and London market firms have fewer than 100 employees. Companies of this scale typically lack the resources and/or budget to carry out wholesale technological change, which is why a mutualised solution for London market digitisation makes increasing sense.The insurance industry is a comparatively niche business sector which has largely escaped the notice of global technology companies. As such, all but the largest companies have been reliant on a relatively small number of SME technology firms, supplying highly customised solutions to individual companies. This has resulted in a multitude of complex legacy systems which can prove very difficult and expensive to upgrade or replace.The foundational modernisation work going on in the London market is fundamentally about automating back office operations that clients never see, but is nonetheless a necessary first step towards improving those products and services which are the real client focus.What that means for a traditional insurance business is that, rather than reducing headcount as it takes advantage of greater automation, it can instead repurpose colleagues to perform other tasks that add value to the business.To my mind, that's the hidden value in terms of transforming the way that you think about your business- more thinking time, a reduction in frictional costs, and improved service standards that will drive greater longevity of client relationships.