‘We helped Lloyd’s’

One company is looking to do for the Bermuda reinsurance market the same it did for Lloyd’s of London.

Xchanging is an organization that provides business processing services and technology to a global client base.

Jenna Richardson, director of sales, North American insurance services and head of US insurance channel of Xchanging said: “We have significant operational expertise in the areas of insurance and reinsurance. We run the entire back office for Lloyd’s of London and the London market. “

“What we’re trying to do in Bermuda is emulate some of the success we’ve had in the London market and take some of our initiatives out to a more global market.”

She added Xchanging has been running Lloyd’s back office for more than a decade. 

She said: “What we can see in the London market is having significant value and benefit to the more global insurance and reinsurance marketplace.”

Ms Richardson said Xchanging has been able to help Lloyd’s back office operations by “doing things six times faster and for half the cost.”

She said Bermuda is attractive because “it is a major global insurance market. We’re trying to expand in the North American market as a whole, but Bermuda plays a significant role in the overall global insurance base. A lot of the organizations we work with in the London market actually have Bermuda subsidiaries. They are familiar with Xchanging, they are familiar with the work we do. We view Bermuda as a very close-knit community, similar to what we see in London where the potential exists for some type of shared services approach to take place.

“They’re writing similar business, they’re doing similar things — our overall goal is not to take over any of the core functions for those organizations like underwriting or capital management, is what we want to allow them to focus on, while alleviating some of the burden for the more menial backend processes. We want them to focus on what makes them the money.”

She said what Xchanging would envision, even if it’s a bit futuristic, would be to create a platform with companies like Partner Re, Montpelier, ACE or XL “could leverage Xchanging services for like policy administration or some aspects of claim management or areas of finance and accounting, things that are peripheral of their core business focus.” 

Ms Richardson said an example of this is Netsett, a programme which allows for faster payments with less transactional costs, which has expanded from London to Asia and now the US. 

She said in 2012 in the London market “Xchanging processed approximately $1.1 million premium claims transactions totaling about $80 billion.”

She said only $12 billion cash moved netting about an 80 per cent benefit. 

“There are significant benefits to that… We can see that type of global utility adding significant value to a much larger, broader global marketplace.”

Ms Richardson said claims can take up to four to six weeks for it to settle and in “catastrophic events, they can take up to 12 to 18 months in some cases. We’ve been able to improve that time frame significantly bringing that from weeks down to days with this type of automated platform approach.”