ITC London Day 2: The “Front Door” is Broken… And AI Just Found the Key

After an excellent Day 1, we are reporting from Day 2 at The Brewery for ITC London, the narrative has shifted from the “what” of technology to the “where” of friction. If Day 1 was about the cultural debt of the industry, Day 2 is about the operational bottleneck: the “Front Door.”

For a decade, the insurance industry has been obsessed with modernizing the “back house”—core systems, workbenches, and cloud migrations. Yet, cycle times remain sluggish. The revelation on the main stage today? Modernization is failing because work still enters the enterprise as a messy, unstructured pile of PDFs, handwritten notes, and “analogue” noise.

As Tom Wilde, CEO of Indico Data, put it: “The problem isn’t downstream technology. It’s upstream. People have become the integration layer.”

The Ingestion Imperative: Fixing the Upstream Mess

In a high-stakes fireside chat, Michael Brown, Chief Innovation Officer at Aviva, laid bare the underwriter’s struggle. “I remember days as an underwriter where I was more worried about documents getting printed than the actual analysis of risk,” he shared.

The industry is currently returning to an equilibrium in a softening market, where efficiency isn’t just a “nice to have”it’s a survival mechanism. The “Front Door” problem isn’t just about administrative headaches; it’s about Straight Through Processing (STP).

• The Soft Market Convergence: As market capacity increases and rates soften, the willingness to invest in STP has skyrocketed.
• Structuring the Unstructured: The AI showing the most “red shoes” (traction) right now is in the structuring of semi-structured data—solving the friction points where documents stall the entire chain.

The “Cheat Codes” of Innovation

Aviva’s approach to solving this offers a blueprint for the “Big Carrier” dilemma. Brown described the innovation team as having “cheat codes” from the group, the ability to take more risk and try things the core business units can’t.

“We don’t want to keep those cheat codes for ourselves,” Brown explained. “We want to lend them to the business units to solve real opportunities.”

A standout success mentioned was a partnership between Aviva and Indico Data that moved a pilot in the Canadian business from days to minutes with accuracy in the early 90s. Crucially, this wasn’t about squeezing operational expenses; it was an unlock. It allowed Aviva to service a channel they previously couldn’t touch due to volume constraints.

Digital Follow Underwriting: From Concept to Edge

The conversation at ITC London moved into the evolution of “Follow Underwriting” in the Lloyd’s and global markets. Digital trading is no longer a sandbox experiment; it is moving into production.

Dan Walsh (Ardonagh Specialty) and Reid Stanway (Ki Insurance) highlighted that while software development has never been easier, the challenge remains Data Governance and Compliance.

The “Hero Work” and the End of Paperwork

Perhaps the most inspiring takeaway from Day 2 was the vision of the “New Underwriter.” By fixing the “front door,” the industry isn’t just saving time; it’s restoring the art of insurance.

If brokers and underwriters can use AI (think Gemini or ChatGPT-style interfaces) to query slips, check follow-capacity, and interpret risks instantly, they can return to what they actually enjoy: the clients.

“I remember doing brokering a long time ago,” one panelist reminisced. “I used to do a lot of paperwork and maybe less with the clients. The fact that they can now do more with the clients is a really exciting concept.”

Final Thoughts from the ITC London Floor

A recurring theme throughout the morning was the realization that while the industry is hyper-focused on AI bias, it often overlooks the pre-existing human bias baked into legacy underwriting. Meghana Nile from AutoRek highlighted this during the women’s perspective session, noting that the conversation around bias isn’t just a technical hurdle but a cultural one. By bringing a more diverse range of voices to the table, specifically through the lens of women in leadership—the industry is beginning to address how technology can actually act as a “bias-corrector” rather than a “bias-amplifier.“

While the global giants talk about overarching strategies, others are doing the gritty work of applying these tools to underserved markets. Yandy Plasencia, Founder and CEO of DataHaven, shared insights from his extensive Q&A with industry influencers including those from AF Insurance.

The front door is being repaired. The question for CIOs is no longer “should we fix it,” but “how fast can we swing it open?”