A lot of people, even a lot of French people, have forgotten Minitel. In the early 1980s, before anyone elsewhere had even heard of the word ‘internet’, everybody in France was connected through a nationwide online network. Unlike the hype today around AI, which cannot be escaped without scuba apparatus, Minitel garnered little international attention. Even today, despite being quietly revolutionary, it is a mere footnote in the story of the development of the digital age.

Minitel was a visionary, almost sci-fi government initiative to create universal electronic access to information, services, and each other. It could be used to buy stuff online, arrange travel, and to research things. It had email and chat functions. In 1984, the government gave every household (including chez moi) a free Minitel terminal (financed, it was said, by the huge savings realised by ending the printing of millions of telephone directories).

Minitel was the France Wide Web.

Overtaken by its world-wide successor, Minitel was turned off exactly 14 years ago this month. Over its 30-year run, it provided a nation-scale proof of concept for the future internet. It introduced millions of French people to e-commerce and online messaging. Everyone else remained in the telephonic dark ages for another decade, barely connected through a modern version of a pair of old tins joined with taut string.

In a similar way, a modest insurance e-commerce platform called OPAL deserves a lot of credit as a pioneer of electronic trading in the Lloyd’s market. Whilst the wider market was getting nowhere retargeting its operating model, replacing its limited platform, and renumbering its blueprints, Aegis, the managing agency behind the soft-spoken, understated specialty insurance e-commerce platform, was selling Lloyd’s coverage with an enduring success unmatched by earlier ground-breakers (like Beazley Furlonge’s EazyPro and ERC Frankona’s Rio… remember them?).

“OPAL provides brokers with instant, white labelled, and contract-certain quotes that can be bound and sent straight to Insureds with minimal input by brokers in minutes,” the platform’s ‘”marketing website” explains. But if you’re neither a broker trading a range of high-hazard buy-back coverages or terrorism insurance (nor an insurance technology fancier), you’ve probably never heard of it.

I bring it up because OPAL published some wise words on the very same web site last week.

With digital trading platforms evolving into “more intelligent, data-led trading models in which submission data is ingested, enriched, triaged, and routed with far less manual intervention”, the source of competitive advantage will shift, the anonymous Aegis blogger wrote.

“Competitive advantage will increasingly come not from offering a platform alone, but from the quality of data connectivity, underwriting responsiveness, and ease of broker interaction that sit behind it”, the author postulates.

I couldn’t agree more. The only challenge will be sustaining this advantage as others catch up.

Before computers and their AI can make all the humans obsolete, however, we will have to break some old habits, the blog advises. The London Market must shed its  inconsistent submission formats, legacy technology, and fragmented workflows, along with ousting “the continued importance of underwriting judgement in more bespoke placements”, OPAL suggests.

Technology to support improved workflows is already available, constantly evolving, and in widespread use. The judicious application of AI can already almost entirely eliminate data compatibility problems. But if we still insist on deploying old-fashioned human underwriting judgement, we will be unable to fully automate all the steps in the chain, even for follow lines (at least, not for now).

Is that an issue? OPAL says: “Ingestion should not be seen as a universal straight-through solution.” That is true only if one believes that ingestion is the final step in adopting a fully automated, human-eradicating platform for submission, underwriting, and binding (maybe ‘the Matrix’).

But if, like me, you believe technology provides an opportunity to enhance human underwriters’ abilities and skills, and to reduce expense ratios, then the answer is ‘FALSE’. If we can get the data in smoothly (hint: we can, even without disciplined adherence to data standards), we already have the technology to do everything else (everyone does, as I wrote last week).

Happily OPAL fails to disappoint, declaring that speciality market insurance technology’s “greatest value is likely to come from improving intake, pre-population, enrichment, and workflow routing while preserving human decision-making where complexity requires it.”

Exactly! Note that if it doesn’t take that route, we all may as well pack our Boxes and head to the Job Centre.

OPAL closes its blog with a short-term recipe for competitive advantage. The ingredients are “superior data intake and enrichment, clearer digitally expressed underwriting appetite, faster and more predictable response times, and better integration into broker workflows”. As orders go, it’s not particularly tall.

Every London market insurer is able to and should implement and complete a successful change programme to achieve those four goals by the end of the year. (If anyone tells you that’s not possible, ask someone else.) After that, differentiation will return to where it was always meant to be: in better underwriting decisions (including risk selection, rating, and portfolio management), and great claims service.

When it’s done, we will trade into an exciting new era of universal electronic access to risk information, and to each other’s underwriting and risk distribution services. Then all insurance firms can (finally) get back to concentrating on their core area of excellence.

In the meantime, those that don’t follow Opal’s lead are likely to slip into the footnotes, just behind the France Wide Web.

Guillaume Bonnissent is Chief Executive of Quotech.