Lloyds Looks To Kinnect More Often
Property coverage for a U.S. factory was the first live risk processed by the Lloyds market using its new Kinnect Platform, which allows brokers and underwriters to exchange data electronically.
Lloyds management called the first use of Kinnect last month a major milestone in the markets modernization efforts.
Lloyd's created Kinnect to provide technology and supporting services that enable underwriters and brokers to pass data electronicallyallowing different IT systems to communicate so risk data can be sent back and forth and stored centrally in the format each party prefers.
Kinnect is described as an international venture, sponsored by Lloyds. It enables commercial lines trading partners to send and receive risk data electronically for quicker and higher-quality business completion, via the Kinnect Platform.
The first use of the system processed property coverage for a Florida concrete plant and involved Lloyds broker Willis Ltd. and Wellington Underwriting. The covered entity was not identified.
Ashok Gupta, Kinnects chief executive, hailed the transaction activity as “a defining moment” for his company and “a big step toward our goalfor Kinnect to be adopted across the insurance industry, bringing improved efficiency and reducing errors by cutting out the endless re-keying of data from one system into another.”
Willis, the global insurance broker, is one of six initial customers that are set to use the Kinnect Platform. In addition to Willis, the companies that have signed up to use the Kinnect Platform are broker Marsh and underwriters ACE European Group, Amlin Beazley and Wellington.
Kinnect, Lloyds said, is already in discussion with other brokers and underwriters. Further announcements regarding new customers will be made this year.
Richard Bucknall, chief operating officer at Willis, said that working with Kinnect, Willis could help improve the insurance industrys operation because “Kinnect enables us to send risk data to a wide range of underwriters, and for the market to respond quickly and efficiently to bind that risk. That can only be good for our clients and good for the industry as a whole.”
Lloyds said Kinnect is an important element in Lloyds business processes reform. The system, Lloyds said, is an effective solution to a problem that has long dogged the general insurance industrypassing data from systems used by brokers to those used by underwriters.
Currently, Lloyds said, when risk data is sent from one party to another, information has to be printed off, faxed or e-mailed, and then re-keyed by the recipient. Management said the process is inefficient, time consuming, costly, leads to large numbers of keying errors, and creates a risk of discrepancy between important records of data supporting an insurance contract.
Kinnect, it was explained, solves the problem by allowing different IT systems to communicate so that risk data can be sent back and forth, and stored centrally, in the format each party prefers.
More information on Kinnect is available at www.kinnect.com
Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, January 16, 2004. Copyright 2004 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.
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