Insurance giant Lloyd's hires DXC to migrate org off legacy mainframes to AWS cloud

Lloyd's, the world's largest insurance marketplace, has contracted DXC Technology to digitise its processes as part of a multi-year effort to move on from a largely paper-based, analogue way of working.

The London insurance market accounts for 7.6 per cent of global commercial reinsurances, and comprises almost a quarter of the gross domestic product for the City as its gross written premium is worth more than $110bn. It is made up of more than 50 insurance firms, 200-plus registered brokers, and a global network of 4,000 local cover holders.

Oh, and it employs 47,000 people across the UK.

The intention is to pull the 300-year-old organisation into the 21st century. DXC said it is going to rearchitect the "entire IT system and develop a cloud-native digital platform running on AWS to replace legacy mainframes, while automating manual processes."

In a canned remark, Lloyd's CEO John Neal said the grand plan is to "transition to a single platform solution that will provide automated processing and accounting for the market, a substantial reduction in operating costs, and offer customers a much faster, better service."

DXC will also try to help speed up the deployment of new applications, and provide tools including analytics to comb through data.

Lloyd's Market Association (LMA) and the International Underwriting Association (IUA) have also approved the tech work. "This is a significant step on the journey to digitise the Lloyd's and London market," said LMA CEO Sheila Cameron.

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"As an association, IUA and its members understand that digital transformation is imperative to their businesses and to remaining competitive in the London market," added Dave Matcham, CEO at IUA.

Jon C Davies, research director at TechMarketView, hinted that the project was long overdue. "As technology modernisation within the insurance sector has gained pace, Lloyd's and the London Market have been losing ground to more technically advanced global insurance markets.

"As a result, the technology agreement with DXC represents a major milestone for this historic centre."

The financial details of the agreement were not disclosed but the contract will be a welcome shot in the arm for DXC, which is itself going through a transformation to get fitter for the cloud era.

The move comes days after it emerged that UK regulators in the British banking sector are considering ways to get more access to data and IT systems from the big public cloud providers to assess their operational resilience in respect of outages and cyber attacks. ®