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Lloyd’s of London: Lloyd’s Lab

In 2018, Lloyd’s of London partnered with L Marks to create Lloyd’s Lab, a new hub for insurance innovation within the 330-year-old specialist insurance and reinsurance market.

Lloyd’s Lab created an environment to develop new products and deliver solutions to meet the unique and rapidly changing needs of the Lloyd’s market. Now a global center of insurtech, Lloyd’s Lab is an award-winning innovation lab bringing together insurers, brokers, and entrepreneurs, embedding new technologies into Lloyd’s and the Lloyd’s market, and supporting the market’s shared goal of sharing risk to create a braver world.

The selected businesses benefit from the insights, mentorship and practical support of both the market and corporation, allowing them to develop products and services that cater to the current needs and future ambitions of the marketplace. Since its doors opened, over 80 teams have taken part in the Lloyd’s Lab across seven cohorts. Through those teams, Lloyd’s Lab has:

  • Facilitated the creation of dozens of partnerships and new products
  • Enabled the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines to low-income countries
  • Helped measure the carbon footprint of the insurance customers
  • Demonstrated how insurance products can avert disasters
  • Created products which pay out when critical clouds fail
  • Saved the market 13,000 hours of data entry per year
  • Delivered the world’s first IVF insurance product

Lloyd’s Lab entered its fourth year in 2022, launching its 8th cohort focusing on systemic risk posed by climate change, supply chain disruption, data and modeling, and claims handling.

Lloyd’s Lab is both delivering pioneering products and services for the Lloyd’s market and driving transformation throughout the insurance industry. As a tech hub geared toward entrepreneurial solutions, the Lab has become the focal point for the organisation’s wider innovation agenda.

Addressing the imperative set by Covid-19, alongside the two cohorts in 2020, Lloyd’s Lab also created two additional programmes to respond to different aspects of the global pandemic, from customer support and economic recovery in the short term to building resilience in the market in view of future waves of the virus and crises on a similar scale.

Lloyd’s Lab continues to achieve successes for the insurtechs, for Lloyd’s, and for the Lloyd’s market. The Lloyd’s Lab alumni have raised over $250 million since joining the lab and 64% of the startups that have joined Lloyd’s Lab have achieved commercial deployment across the market.

These include Optalitix that is saving more than 13,000 hours of data entry per year for the market and Parsyl that partnered with Lloyd’s to create Syndicate 1796 and the Global Health Risk Facility to insure the transportation of the Covid-19 vaccine.

  • 2020 Reactions London Market Awards ‘Insurtech Incubator of the Year’
  • 2019 Reactions London Market Awards ‘Insurtech Incubator of the Year’
  • Finalist in Insurance Times Tech and Innovation Awards 2019 ‘Technology Partner of the Year – Underwriting’
  • Identified as one of best corporate accelerators in the UK by Beauhurst

Results

Cohorts 1-6

Parsyl

Parsyl’s supply chain management platform helps shippers, retailers and insurers understand the conditions that will maintain the quality of sensitive and perishable goods as they move through the supply chain.

Collaboration 

Part of Cohort 1, Parsyl had not worked within the insurance industry before joining the Lab. During the programme, the team worked with Lloyd’s and a handful of top-tier market syndicates to develop a new initiative offering crafted risk coverage for sensitive shipments using Parsyl’s solution. The team also worked with its mentor group to access historical claims data in order to determine the potential usefulness of its solution for  a much larger claims initiative.

Outcomes

By the end of the programme in December 2018, Parsyl had established partnerships with six large insurers with a view to providing enhanced marine loss-mitigation and risk-prevention services. In February 2019, two of those insurers – Ascot and Beazley – launched a Lloyd’s-based cargo consortium, offering insureds the use of Parsyl’s device to manage risk claims and performance.

In July 2020, Parsyl announced that it will provide insurance and risk mitigation services to support the manufacturing and distribution of a Covid-19 vaccine. Developed in anticipation of a Covid-19 vaccine, Parsyl’s “Syndicate 1796” both recognises and responds to the need for a comprehensive and streamlined insurance and risk mitigation strategy that can complement manufacturing and distribution objectives of major vaccine development efforts, including the ACT-Accelerator Vaccines Pillar (COVAX) and the US Government’s Operation Warp Speed (OWS). Syndicate 1796 was recently approved by Lloyd’s of London and is planning to begin operations on 1 October 2020.

Layr  

Layr’s proprietary underwriting algorithm makes it easier for small businesses to access liability insurance by enabling business owners to select the most suitable insurance, quoting a real-time monthly fee to be paid by credit card and, finally, identifying the relevant insurance carrier.

Collaboration

During Lloyd’s Lab, Layr completed API integrations with service providers including Xero Accounting and QuickBooks Accounting, providing commercial customers with a tailored quote in a single click – and without having to complete the usual insurance application.

Outcomes

Following the end of the programme, Lloyd’s invested in Layr, while Head of Innovation at Lloyd’s, Trevor Maynard, joined the company as an advisor. Layr used some of the funds from the Lloyd’s investment to obtain surplus lines licenses, enabling the company to operate in the UK. The team has since signed a contract with a carrier to have its terror product deployed on the Layr platform.

On 1st July 2020, Layr announced a $5 million Series Seed round of financing led by Sandbox Insurtech Ventures with participation from new investors Flyover Capital and Maschmeyer Group Ventures, and from existing investor, Lloyd’s of London.