Lloyd's of London likes its traditions.
The 330-year old insurance market,
where people buy cover for everything from satellites
to submersibles, are stuck with tried
and tested ways of doing business.
Face-to-face negotiation is a good example.
Brokers and insurers meet in the famous underwriting room
to discuss how best to cover their clients' risks.
And deals are often still concluded on paper.
There are also a whole host of more ceremonial traditions
- from the book where ships that sink
are recorded with a quill pen to the Lutine Bell,
which is rung on very ceremonial occasions, and the strikingly
uniformed waiters who usher visitors around the building.
By and large, it works well.
About $34bn pounds worth of insurance
is bought at Lloyd's every year.
Last year, it paid out $bn pounds in claims.
But even Lloyd's has to move with the times.
So they've set up Lloyd's Lab, where 10 start-ups
have 10 weeks to get to know how Lloyd's works
and what it needs.
We know with new technology we have
to keep thinking about innovation.
And the lab is a way to bring technology from outside
into London and think about how we can innovate in the future.
The companies in the lab have plenty of ideas,
whether it's using AI to help small businesses buy
insurance, blockchain to pay claims more efficiently,
or drones and mobile phones to help
respond to natural catastrophes.
But getting insurance companies and start-ups together
isn't easy.
A lot of people say they speak different languages.
While insurers talk about claims ratios and brokerage costs,
the start-ups are interested in funding rounds and product
development.
We have all of our jargon in the insurance
industry and the technology jargon as well.
But we have been really pleased with the attitude of the market
to this.
And we're really actually seeing a kind of meeting of minds
rather than a clashing of cultures.
Both sides seem to think it's worth a shot,
even a tiny slice of Lloyd's's annual premiums
is a big prize for an entrepreneur with a good idea.
Tradition is important to Lloyd's.
But there's more opportunity that they can take advantage
of.
That's true among any industry that's
faced with those disruptors, if you will.
But I think you'll find that most of the cohorts
here are not looking to disrupt it.
We're here just to make it more efficient
so that the companies that we are trying to provide insurance
for, risk management for, can grow at a rate
and make the overall pie bigger for everybody.
For the insurers, technology offers the opportunity
to get an advantage, however small, over rivals.
There's plenty of competition for business in Lloyd's and
prices for some types of insurance
have been falling for years.
Almost immaterial of the trading environment, people
are conscious that innovation and technology is already
having an impact and will have an impact on our industry.
And actually, regardless of whether it
was a good time in the market or a bad time, we need to adapt.
We need to modernise.
And we need to change.
It's a very traditional industry in a lot of ways.
Is it culturally difficult to encourage people and insurance
to look at new technology?
It's trying to explain to people simultaneously that there
are some challenges out there that we have to respond to
but also showing them the opportunities.
Culturally, it varies across the industry.
There are some people who are very receptive to it,
other people who maybe need warming up to it
a little bit more.
The people organising the lab have
had to work hard to bring the two sides together,
convincing them to change the way they do things.
In some respects, it's been a challenge.
Lloyd's and the market have had to accelerate the way
that they work.
And the start-ups will sometimes slow down
in order to be able to work with the incumbents.
And that's the process of these labs that actually does end up
finding that medium that both parties can play it.
If the lab is to succeed, it will
need to convince the doubters that the start-ups can
offer something worthwhile.
People have tried to modernise Lloyd's in the past with
limited success.
But with the challenges to the market growing,
the people behind the lab think that this time they really
need to make it work.