Back in the early 1690s, Edward Lloyd, a coffee shop entrepreneur, had a brilliant idea about how to sell more coffee. He would put all the information needed by marine underwriters in the City of London into a single place, and make it readily available. He would place the most relevant and best sources of data literally into their hands using a new technology: the printing press. He hoped this would make his coffee shop the epicentre of insurance in London.

He launched a news sheet, and printed it twice a week from January 1692. The first section was entitled Ships Arrived at, and Departed from several Ports of England, as I have Account of them in London. Part two (in practice, the other side of the page) was called An Account of what English Shipping, and Foreign Ships for England, I hear of in Foreign Ports.

This made the eponymous Mr. Lloyd the first insurTech founder.

His innovation is what we’d now call a ‘data-first strategy’. It worked wonders. Underwriters began to congregate at his coffee house, so he extended his insurTech offering. In 1696 he launched Lloyd’s News, which covered all the breaking news about European military and naval action. It also covered ship movements, including warships, which was a boon for the war-risks crowd. Later his successor amalgamated the publications into Lloyd’s List, which is still published today.

You know the rest of the story. Today Lloyd’s insures much more than just ships and cargoes, but it is still essential for underwriters to have all the information they need, easily accessible, all in one place.

Our namesake gathered the shipping news he published from various informed individuals. His original coffee-shop was right by the Customs House, so he no doubt had sources there to provide his ‘Accounts’.

Today valuable underwriting data comes from a variety of sources all over the world, public and private. It is fed into underwriting workbench systems in compatible formats via smooth-functioning APIs to make it easily available to underwriters exactly when they need it (or at least it should be). It is enormously useful and time-saving for underwriters to have it all in one place – just as Edward Lloyd understood.

He took advantage of technology to make his innovation work. Printing wasn’t revolutionary tech, but his method of data delivery was. Today we can exploit technology in similar ways to give underwriters all the information they need to underwrite risks.

The technology itself need not be revolutionary, but the delivery must be perfectly designed for underwriters – and preferably done by someone who understands the pain points they face every day. It must solve real problems they face every day.

It’s what Edward Lloyd did, and his effort really did change the world of insurance.