Disrupting the approach to expert management within the Lloyd’s and London market is not easy. Traditions and relationships run deep, with embedded practices and processes encompassing all aspects of claims handling, including expert selection, appointment, and management. Yet this approach comes at a high cost and with associated problems around visibility and control, making disruption inevitable to alleviate these burdensome issues.
The modern and future approach to supporting and overseeing expert management is a hybrid one combining relationships and data. This enables smarter strategies to be determined and claim decisions that provide transparent and accelerated policyholder outcomes, whilst controlling cost and leakage for (re)insurers.
The delivery of Gemini, the Lloyd’s and London Market Expert Management platform and service, allows carriers to better manage their relationships, associated performance, cost and policyholder outcomes, whilst managing and assessing claims expense and leakage.
Gemini was developed by LMA members, and delivered by Advent Insurance Management, to be a hybrid model that captures structured data on indemnity and expense at a granular level. For the first time, structured data is now available for analysis of expert spend by individual fee earner, expert firm, type of expert, class of business and territory. It does this by connecting a digital panel of experts, at a market and carrier level, to expert and claims data that integrates into managing agents’ claims management systems. It also supports performance oversight by way of due diligence, and enables the low-cost processing and payment of expert invoices and fees.
Gemini is a data-first solution that enables data connections to plug and play with any third party via API, supported by low code and modern technologies. It is therefore fully aligned with the Future at Lloyd’s principles and the plans of Blueprint 2. What has been achieved within a focused claims project should ideally be extrapolated into Lloyd’s reforms, to deliver a claims and customer-focused model, powered by data and integrated technologies, and supported by smart payment methods.
Managing and reducing claim costs are naturally part of a claims department’s remit. Doing so with the right data, tools, and insight can enable cost oversight, cost savings, and inform future claims strategies and decisions, putting the analysis and power back into the hands of the markets’ claims handlers. Looking at this through the lens of a claims manager or handler, imagine the wealth of accurate data on final claim outcomes, including indemnity and expense costs, providing powerful insights that can enhance future claims strategies, informed by your portfolio.
Imagine in three years’ time diving into rich and detailed data from a portfolio of claims. What would that body of knowledge enable claims managers to do differently and how could it generate better claim outcomes, for the managing agent and /or enhance the experience for the customer? At your fingertips will be layers of structured and granular data, providing deep insights into claim history from first notification to final closure. This will enable new claims to be analysed against those data insights with real time portfolio analysis of claims with similar characteristics, from the same class of business and the same territory. This data and the analytics will act as an intelligent assistant that will recommend and support your claim’s decisions, enabling you to consider whether an expert appointment would be valuable or how a full and final settlement could be reached earlier. Both would enable you to manage your indemnity, reduce expense and the transactional volume on a claim, and generate an earlier decision for the customer. This powerful and supportive use of simple data can make a difference to your portfolio and enhance how the claim and its costs can be managed.
While it is yet to be fully discovered how influential and valuable the data will be for claims professionals when making claims decisions, it is fair to say this considerable resource has the potential to bring dramatic improvements over the status quo.
Claims managers are currently tasked with managing claims and associated expenses, yet with no visibility of how much they’re spending on claims experts, how can they reasonably have any control over claims spend? Gemini’s enriched data set empowers claims managers with accurate data about the cost of services and the value they bring. That coupled with the management tools available within the Gemini platform (onboarding of experts with due diligence, the ability to set and measure target SLAs, and the creation and management of panels within the platform) is genuinely game changing. The journey toward proactive management and oversight of claims experts has begun and will ultimately deliver better claims outcomes that greatly benefit carriers and customers alike.