The London Market Group is working on an Intelligent Market Reform Contract (iMRC), a digitised version of current insurance contracts underwritten in the London Insurance market which are created as Word documents, then saved as PDFs and often still printed.

The ultimate future vision is a fully computable contract built as a digital object, and usable by both humans and computers, Atrium CIO Justin Emrich says.

“Today we start with documents and then expend untold sums trying to extract the data. The future is the other way round,” Mr Emrich said.

“This future vision is akin to moving from vinyl to streaming,” he said. “We will digitise every number and every word in the contract, resulting in instant contract production and data capture into downstream systems, including accounting and settlement.”

Extracting data from contracts is a labour intensive, expensive and time-consuming process, and Mr Emrich says it takes an average of 4.5 days and thousands of people across the market to produce a technical account from analogue information.

“All data is manually entered – including some from faxes,” he said

Under the digitised iMRC, firms will be required to include essential data in a prescribed format. This will map to ACORD Global Reinsurance & Large Commercial data standards.

"Once we have the market trading data first, the age of MS Word as the mechanism for creating insurance contracts will finally come to an end and the significant cost savings and benefits of digitisation will be realised,” Mr Emrich said.

Details can be seen here.