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Congratulations to Atrium's Justin Emrich who was recognised at last week's LM Forum's Market People Awards 2017, where he received an award for his contribution to market transformation.

In his recent article on LinkedIn Justin said;

"I was honoured last week to receive the award for contribution to market transformation at the LM Forums Market People Awards 2017. 

With the first phase of modernisation solutions now being delivered and adopted, the year-end feels like a good time to think about the future and a somewhat more radical vision of the market. 

My vision is of a market where:

• insureds and their assets are bound to their insurers and reinsurers by Smart Contracts;
• insurance documents are data rich in their content and construction;
• quotation and placement are wholly electronic but where verbal communication between traders remains where needed;
• accounting transactions are frictionless possibly through a distributed ledger without the need for any manual checking or data entry;
• we have transparency from quotation to claim for all stakeholders including the policyholder where appropriate; 
• advanced technology is playing its rightful place - triaging, automating, analysing and allowing our market of experts to use their brains rather than their keyboards.

The market has taken the first steps towards this vision with a placing platform that allows documents to be traded, but we must not stop there and the next step should be focussing on joining up systems to drive through efficiencies. The Structured Data Capture service is turning documents into data, hopefully a process that will be overtaken once our contracts are rich in data from their point of creation. The days of ink on paper are numbered with the arrival of digital agreement, so please let's consign our ink stamps to the display cabinets in Lime Street. Finally, we must move swiftly to real-time information from producer to insurer for our delegated authority business thus freeing us from the evils of the bordereaux.

There is so much more we still need to do, and I am pleased to report that work is going on which is laying down some of these foundations. The LM TOM has agreed to support an exciting new Claims workstream; we have work ongoing in the contract creation space, and prototypes are planned for distributed ledgers to eliminate downstream friction. 

It was clear to me that the TOM vision was really just the start of a modernisation programme for the London Insurance Market - an Operating Model for Today rather than for Tomorrow. But that statement in no way belittles the staggering challenge of bringing about market-wide change, let alone the radical transformation that the market now so badly needs, and I applaud the efforts by all involved who have helped us get this far. 

Transformation of the market has only just begun. Let's keep our pedal to the metal."