Filip Wuebbeler
Tuesday 26 August 2014- With a decade of experience providing market & competitive intelligence in the London insurance market, we talk to Filip Wuebbeler, Senior Manager of Lloyd’s Market Intelligence team about the importance of monitoring, enhancing & sharing data with the Lloyd’s market. (source: Lloyd’s of London)
What is Market Intelligence?
The Lloyd’s Market Intelligence (MI) team analyses the world’s specialist (re)insurance and markets. The team’s unique position allows them to not only access market-level analytics on Lloyd’s, but also access third party intelligence providers and consultants. Most importantly, however, is the access to key decision makers and thought leaders in the Lloyd’s market, ranging from Lloyd’s country managers, underwriters and brokers around the world. This provides a distinct advantage in effectively supporting Lloyd’s business development community with insights that facilitate our market’s ability to grow profitably over the next few years.
Why is it important for the Lloyd’s market to look at developing business internationally?
The pace of change in the world is ever increasing – technologically, socially and entrepreneurially. At present, we estimate that 8 % of commercial insurance business originates in countries that the IMF classifies at “emerging / developing”. Research that we have conducted earlier this year suggests that by 2025, 25% of commercial lines will originate from such markets reaching premiums worth around US$ 380bn. This means that it is vital for us to ensure that the Lloyd’s market is positioned well to take advantage of these new markets. Accordingly, the team has a role in helping the market to “bake new pies ” to paraphrase Tom Bolt’s advice to Lloyd’s business development community.
What are the challenges in developing your products for the Lloyd’s market?
The diversity of the 56 managing agencies at Lloyd’s means that there will always be different ways our products & services are utilised and opinions in how they should evolve. In particular, I value meeting with market participants to understand their needs and each week attend MI consultancy sessions where we gain feedback from our market. We strive to incorporate this feedback into our product development and survey our market to understand insurance opportunities when developing our Class Review product. (Class Review offers benchmarking analysis comparing Lloyd’s business with its competitors in key territories, broken down by specialty class of business.)
One challenge we have had to work with is the difficulty of finding appropriate ways of sharing our products with the market. Up until very recently, there has been no effective way of sharing sensitive and tailored information with our market. At the beginning of August we launched our MI Portal via Secure Store which allows managing agents to log in and obtain information through a secure portal. At the moment the system has been rolled out to managing agents who are able to log in and view a version of our Compare Countries data tool tailored to their syndicates’ information. (Compare Countries provides high level statistics across 200+ territories on the economy, insurance market and Lloyd’s business.)
We have also used the MI portal to distribute insurer and broker profiles along with our in depth Market Insight reports on Brazil & Indonesia which we have developed alongside KPMG. Future reports are in the pipeline and the Managing Agent Compare Countries tool will get a major upgrade by end of September 2014.
How do you envisage MI will develop?
While the team has been around for the past ten years, there has been no better time and greater need for our market to have access to the MI data and insight we produce. The team has a significant role to play in making Lloyd’s ambitious Vision 2025 goals a reality. I would like to ensure that all managing agents have access to in depth, timely and tailored intelligence that suits their business needs. Accordingly the path towards tailoring intelligence and building up a relationship with business developers in each managing agent is something the team is working towards over the next few months.
Initiatives such as our tailored Managing Agents Compare Countries tool, which we will launch at the end of September, will enable managing agents to view their business in the context of the Lloyd’s market, the insurance market and the broader macroeconomic environment. A non-tailored version of this tool is already available on our Compare Countries site and a beta version can be requested to be added to the Secure Store site in the meantime.
What do you enjoy most about working at Lloyd’s?
I enjoy working with a fantastic team, most of who have been recruited in the last year. The diversity of the team contributes to an environment which allows everyone to thrive and learn from each other. Building an MI product range is certainly fun, but building a team that is increasingly being recognised is what I find most enjoyable and rewarding about MI.
Click here to access Lloyd’s Market Intelligence products.
Filip joined Lloyd’s as an analyst in July 2004 to develop and support the launch of the Lloyd’s Market Intelligence Team.
Since 2007, Filip has led a team of analysts to provide the Lloyd’s market with business and competitor analysis as well as strategic advice on international market and licence development.
Prior to joining Lloyd’s, Filip worked as a Strategy Economist for the Export Credit Guarantee Department (ECGD).
