Peter Smyth , VP of PlacingHub developer Ebix Europe, shines the spotlight on why an API first strategy really matters for the future London Market electronic placement:
“The world is embracing data, and the global commercial re/insurance market is no exception. It’s just taken a little longer to get there.
Insurance contracts, and the vast amount of data that accompanies them in this complex risk market, have to be exchanged between brokers and underwriters on the electronic trading platforms that now support and orchestrate the placement process.
This has to be done at the original submission stage and then continually supplemented as the quotation, negotiation and binding processes ensue. The practitioners’ analytical systems need to ingest and validate that data so they can price the risk, negotiate it, aggregate the exposures and, once the deal is done, pass on all that data to downstream systems for processing, settlement and storage.
Except it’s not that simple right now. The brokers’ and underwriters’ systems-and the placing platforms that now sit between them-mostly can’t talk to each other yet.
Why? Because the placing platforms aren’t all providing the means to do this. And that means they need APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).
For the vast majority of the market, it’s all being done by hand instead with staff acting as data entrepreneurs and interpreters, copy-typing submission data and dragging documents between their systems and the placing platforms.
This means that data has been input into another system by someone else just a few hours earlier.
This double-entry duplication process has no upside-it costs a fortune and introduces process inefficiencies, delays and errors. The market cannot properly modernise while its valuable resources are shackled to their keyboards doing this.
It seriously devalues the benefit of electronic placement, which cannot fully support and enhance the placing process until we’ve relieved those resources of their burden and made the computers talk to each other via APIs instead.
After which, moving a package of structured placement data and documents on or off a placing platform pre, mid or post-bind will be the work of seconds, not hours, and not a single error will be introduced.
It’s not like APIs are a rarity these days either. You can barely go a day without unwittingly using one on your smartphone or a website where they facilitate the communication of data between you and their back-end systems.
They have other uses too, like allowing systems to be used “headlessly”, bypassing their user interfaces, like many quote/bind systems in the Delegated Underwriting Authority arena can do right now.
But that can all wait a bit. It’s the data transfer APIs we need opening up now, on every placement platform.
And then, not one data element will need to be re-keyed by anyone ever again.
It’s simply common sense. And the benefit is huge.”
This article was first published in Insurance Newslink and is shared here with kind permission and thanks. The original article can be accessed here (subscription): Open your APIs: electronic placement is evolving-Ebix – OnlyStrategic Financial / Banking / Insurance