Atticus Insights

In H1, 2018, we more than doubled the number of DQPro users in the London insurance Market. Here’s why compliance is one of our fastest growing use cases:

Atticus has been working with the London Market for over 10 years. In our consulting work we frequently saw how our clients’ compliance teams were struggling to apply the checks and controls they need with business side users. This use case was just one of many unmet needs that inspired us to invest in our product startup, DQPro. In just two years, almost a quarter of the risks placed at Lloyd’s are being monitored with DQPro by GWP, with usage expanding to America and Asia.

One of the reasons for our recent growth has been an unwavering focus on solving multiple carrier painpoints and of these, Heads of Compliance continue to be amongst our strongest supporters. When we asked them why, five consistent themes emerged

• Compliance wants to work more closely with the business – in near real time

The ability for compliance teams to work more proactively on a real-time basis has significantly improved the quality of interaction with front line business users. Business managers now become aware of critical issues such as licence breaches or unusual commissions immediately and a smart workflow is launched. This fosters joint collaboration and has removed many prior areas of conflict, making the compliance team’s role less confrontational as perceived by the business.

• Easing the pain of legacy systems – “makes us agile”

Almost every London insurers’ operations still rely on complex, inflexible legacy systems, ad hoc tools and manual processes. With businesses and regulators requiring increasingly stringent reporting, compliance teams have been struggling to keep up with a clear understanding of what is happening across their businesses on a timely basis.

“DQPro makes us agile.” Says one of our clients. “New market checks can be deployed and fine-tuned quickly to particular criteria such as premium threshold, territory or legal jurisdiction. This makes it perfect for creating rule sets to support a specific Lloyd’s licence. In Brazil, for example, the regulator requires Lloyd’s underwriters to perform a risk assessment before issuing a return premium (RP). Our compliance team are now notified when a risk assessment is required and can confirm this has been completed in less than 24 hours”.

• Creating a robust audit trail – “Automatically provides us with evidence.”

Recording underwriting compliance issues on Excel spreadsheets and emailing underwriters to address issues has been common in many insurance companies. It’s inefficient, error prone and makes it almost impossible to track and demonstrate a rigorous audit trail.

“DQPro is solving our clients’ audit problem” a leading Lloyd’s Managing Agent told us. “DQPro automatically provides us with evidence. When Lloyd’s audits controls and transactions at our syndicate, we can very quickly provide a full report on each issue and Lloyd’s can view a comprehensive audit trail.”

Our customers are also finding that they can reduce the cost of external auditors because they have key information available directly from DQPro. One Compliance Officer has estimated her team is saving of up to 4 days a month (20% FTE time) with this feature alone.

• Adapting quickly to new business lines– “We can react much, much faster.”

Successful London Market carriers are quick to identify new areas in which to write new business such as cyber risk and new types of fraud. These bring new regulation and compliance checks which need to be introduced quickly so as not to delay writing the new business. Without a flexible and integrated system,creating and embedding enterprise-widechecks is difficult and time consuming.

One London Market Compliance Officer at a top 5 Lloyd’s carrier is finding that with DQPro the company can react much faster to changes in the business. “We can react much, much faster.” He is now aware of issues in near real-time rather than discovering them late, for example when consolidating reports at month/quarter end. Crucially his team are now proactive rather than reactive in identifying and solving problems. Response is faster because DQPro’s algorithms automatically route issues to the relevant underwriters. The compliance team now monitors how well others are resolving issues, reducing the overall time needed to fix whilst at the same time building an appreciation of the importance of data quality across all parts of the business.

• Smart workflow and daily checks – “Allows us to react more completely.”

Many companies now need to perform control checks daily, across multiple branches, systems and geographies at on an increasing scale. Without a single, scalable, easy to use system, Heads of Compliance are struggling to provide the full range of checks they are expected to undertake.

 “DQPro allows us to react more completely” says one global specialty carrier.“We have no more manual checking or working off clunky exception reports. No more composing emails to underwriters. No more tracking issues in Excel. DQPro automates the issue detection and resolution process, saving us time and cost. This allows our compliance users to adopt a proportionate, risk based response and focus on the issues that matter most. Issue resolution is then tracked to a defined SLA – providing instant visibility of overdue items”

DQPro monitors carrier data 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It ensures that the controls and checks that you need on your underwriting, ops and compliance data are being performed consistently and that issues are resolved quickly.

By tracking extent and speed of resolution and other critical metrics, progress can be measured over time. This approach can quickly be applied across other business teams and we’ve been excited to witness an increase in uptake at our customers after our initial roll-out.

Our best advocates are our customers, many of whom are willing to talk about how DQPro has helped their business reduce frictional cost in the back office and deliver greater data confidence. We would be delighted to show you how DQPro could help you manage your compliance, audit and data management needs. Interested?  Then why not contact us for a demo?