Blueprint Two Foundational Playbook for Managing Agents: In a nutshell

August 17, 2022

At the beginning of this month, the LMA in partnership with NTT Data released the Foundational Playbook for managing agents. In preparation for the Blueprint Two changes going live in 2024, the material aims to provide managing agents with, (i) a common understanding of what they need to do, with whom and by when, and (ii) an understanding of their own readiness and the options available to make the required changes over the next two years.  

The Oxbow Partners team has gone through the 92-slide guide and self-assessment questionnaire and summarised it here for those short of time.  

Recap: How did we get here? 

Back in January 2022, Lloyd’s released the second edition of their Blueprint Two Interactive Guide. The release of the second interactive guide is the fifth major publication related to the marketplace’s Future at Lloyd’s transformation programme initiated by CEO John Neal. 

To refresh your memory of the January Blueprint Two update, read our synopsis and the Oxbow Partners view 

The January update provided the delivery roadmap up to 2024, focussed in three areas: open market, delegated authority and claims. Following the progress update in June, the Foundational Playbook is the latest market release on Blueprint Two. 

Summary of the Foundational Playbook

The Foundational Playbook consists of two tools: 

• Foundational Playbook: a helpful guide outlining the required changes, individual components, user groups, timelines, business impact and implementation options 
• Managing Agent Self-Assessment: a questionnaire to enable managing agents to assess their current state of readiness 

Foundational Playbook 

The playbook has five areas, aimed at different stakeholder groups within the managing agents’ organisations. These are as follows: 

1. The overview – ‘everything you need to know initially’. An executive level recap of the planned Blueprint Two changes and underlying components. This section also provides the consolidated outputs of the detailed functional impact assessments and individual component guides in sections 2 & 3, plus an overview of what changes will be required at go-live (2024 Q2) and what managing agents can start doing today to prepare. 

2. Business process impact assessment – ‘when considering the impact by function’. The guide then analyses the functional impact across three business processes: Open Market Placement, Open Market Claims and Delegated Authority. For each process the guide outlines the current approach and the expected impacts of both the transition services and full digital adoption.   

3. Blueprint Two component breakdown – ‘to support detailed planning & implementation’. This section is a deep-dive into the 13 individual Blueprint Two components (e.g. Digital Gateway, iMRC, CDR etc.). For each component there are three sections, (i) definition of the component and the mandatory changes for 2024, (ii) future process overview with known limitations, unknowns and potential benefit areas to consider, and finally (iii) the breakdown between the transition service and full digital adoption, with corresponding implementation impacts (people, process and technology) and next steps. 

4. Strategy development support – ‘support to build out and/or validate your strategy’. Instructions to complete the self-assessment and contacts for the engagement communities to support queries between now and go live.  

5. Additional material – ‘further guidance, including glossary to refer to from start’. Finally, some additional guidance for carriers to analyse the benefits of the changes and a list of the ‘known unknowns’.   

Managing Agent Self-Assessment 

The self-assessment tool is for managing agents to baseline or validate their current situation against their ambition to adopt Blueprint Two. The questionnaire has eight question sheets (roughly aligned to the business processes – see image below), each with between 10-20 questions. The output of the assessment provides a set of scores split across two dimensions: 

1. Blueprint Two adoption: Current understanding of the situation and planned approach to adopt the future Blueprint Two services  

2. Change readiness: Current readiness to make the required changes, split by people, process and technology