When Constance Dyson (pictured) joined New Dawn Risk, she did not set out to become the executive spearheading its digital overhaul. As she put it, “like most people in insurance, I fell into it completely accidentally, and then it turned out to be quite good fun. So I stuck around.”
Having started her career at a stockbroking firm before moving into insurance broking and then operations, Dyson, now chief operating officer at the specialist Lloyd’s broker, is overseeing a multi-year technology modernisation designed to sharpen service, improve data quality and keep the firm competitive against much larger rivals.
Dyson began her journey on the broking side, before family life prompted a shift in responsibilities. After the arrival of her third child, the two-week road trips that had been part of her role became harder to sustain. New Dawn Risk, meanwhile, needed a full-time operations lead. She moved into the function and has now been running operations for seven years.
That operations mandate has steadily expanded to encompass the firm’s digital transformation, which she says “just sort of accidentally happened.” What has emerged is not a flashy innovation story but a pragmatic re-plumbing of the business, aimed at solving concrete problems: disparate data, manual finance processes, and a broking workforce weighed down by administrative tasks.
The centrepiece of New Dawn Risk’s transformation is the implementation of the Novidea broking platform. Dyson characterises the project as an ongoing effort in its “last throes of implementation”, with “a few tweaks to go” but the bulk of business is now processed through the system.
Critically, she insists the goal is to reinforce, not dilute, the London market’s differentiator.
“The London market is so relationship driven, and that's our real selling point in London, that we don't want technology to just replace the brokers or the underwriters,” she said. “There is a place in the world of insurance, in the industry, for that very face-to-face, relationship driven negotiation and client service.”
The strategy, therefore, has been to use Novidea to strip out repetitive tasks and allow brokers and support teams to focus on higher-value activity. As Dyson put it, the platform is intended “to, streamline the processes to deal with all the repetitive admin, it frees up everyone within the company to do more high value tasks that are important and need doing by a human.”
For an independent broker, that is not a matter of internal efficiency alone; it is central to differentiation. Dyson believes that “service, for an independent broker, is key, because it's the only way we can really differentiate ourselves from the big beasts,” adding that if clients “come to us as New Dawn, and we give them the most fantastic service, then they'll stick with us. And generally they do, which is great.”
In a market flooded with technology offerings, New Dawn Risk relied less on web searches and more on reputation when selecting its broking platform. Dyson recalled that they found Novidea “via word of mouth,” having “spoken to lots of people in the market” after discovering that “if you Google insurance broking platforms, all sorts of completely irrelevant things come up.”
The brokerage followed a disciplined selection playbook it now applies to any significant technology investment: “We asked to speak to several of Novidea’s clients.” She acknowledged that “those references helped us understand how it worked on a day-to-day basis, and what they would need to change”.
On functionality, Novidea “came across to us as the most ahead of the curve. It was a completely new platform, rather than just a slightly more advanced version of the one that we already had.”
But capability alone was not enough; implementation and ongoing support were decisive. Dyson said it is “hugely important to have them on side and have a proper relationship with them, because they are going to be the first people that you need to turn to when there's something that's just not working.” During the main phase of the rollout, “we were having daily calls with them”, a cadence that has now reduced considerably as the firm addresses the final residual glitches.
For Dyson, technology was the easier half of the job. The real challenge lay in people and process change.
New Dawn Risk has a relatively young workforce, which might lead one to assume “they would be embracing of change.”
User adoption was the “trickiest bit,” brokers having to learn the replacement. New Dawn Risk initially adopted a purist model in which brokers handled their own data entry, a “baptism of fire” approach. It quickly became apparent that “data entry and attention to detail for things that they're not that interested in is probably not the way to go.” The firm has since pivoted to a dedicated technical unit: “We set up a completely separate technical team, where technical people from each broking team, handle all of the Novidea processing, the documentation production, essentially everything that's not broking or producing clients”.
Looking back, Dyson is candid about her leadership lessons. She cites broker expectations, and management and project timelines as the two big missteps. On the latter, she reflects that her original ambitions were “rather naive.” She said, if doing it again, “I would hold off informing the brokers that they would need to start using a new system until the platform was firmly in place.”
On job security, Dyson was determined to neutralise concerns early. Anticipating unease around “digital transformation”, she “spent a lot of time geeing everyone up about how it was going to take
away the boring bits and how it would allow them to do the more interesting bits,” stressing that “There won't be any redundancies because of what the system's doing, it will simply allow us to perform better.”
Although the platform has been live for “only a few months,” Dyson reports significant improvements in finance and data governance. She says the firm is now “so much more confident in data. The accuracy of the data that we have at month end is so much better than before,” and that the finance team is “over the moon, because the month-end process, instead of taking four or five days, is now taking a couple of hours.”
By consolidating data “into one place” and ensuring information is entered only once, this minimises the potential for errors, provided the initial input is correct.
Crucially for a broker, Novidea also strengthens service monitoring. Dyson highlighted the ability “to check our service levels, dates and timings.” That insight can be used to tackle persistent bottlenecks, whether with particular underwriters or internal teams, in a more encouraging way. This also crucially enables the firm to recognise and reward strong service performance, rather than only being alerted to problems, which she sees as “really helpful for morale and it's super important for our clients.”
While Novidea currently has limited embedded AI, something Dyson expects to change over time, New Dawn Risk has already deployed an insurance-specific AI engine for reviewing policy wordings and speeding up documentation review.
“We have Limit AI, which alongside Novidea, is used to do document comparison and wording analysis ” she said.
Dyson describes this as “an insurance-specific AI assistant” that can ingest PDFs of expiring and new policy wordings, and “goes through it picking out what's in one, what's not in one, what's better, what's worse.” It can also respond to coverage questions, for example, “What are the Gold Standard endorsements to include on an architect's professional indemnity policy?” and is particularly valuable for checking that quotes align with underlying policy language and that final policies accurately reflect what was originally quoted.
The tool, developed by a US broker is “very US focused,” but already provides meaningful risk control in areas such as long endorsement schedules.
Dyson has spent time engaging with AI vendors across the market, including “AI breakfast meetings and lunch meetings with different AI companies.
She is, however, intrigued by developments such as “smart-follow capacity,” referencing platforms like Ki and InsurX: “It's awesome and really good for brokers. It will gives us really fast responses, and allow us to give clients super-quick service.”
Still, Dyson doubts that AI alone will define the next era of London market innovation. She suspects that “there's going to be something completely new that comes out of left field that is simmering away.”
For all the talk of platforms and algorithms, Dyson returns repeatedly to the distinctiveness of the London market and the need to protect its human fabric.
“I think the important thing about digital technology is that it’s there to enhance the USP of London markets, rather than replace the relationships between clients and brokers, and clients and insurers” she said. Instead, she argues, technology “is fantastic for improving that client experience and helping brokers and underwriters provide an improved service, yet not replacing the human touch.”
In New Dawn Risk’s case, that philosophy has translated into a programme focused on: cleaning data, reshaping teams, and persuading brokers that the less glamorous parts of their role can be delegated to machines, freeing them to spend more time doing what only humans, for now at least, can do.
Away from the office and the demands of digital programmes, Dyson’s world looks very different. “I live in the countryside with four children and two dogs and a husband and some sheep. I just try not to think about insurance too much and I do lots of cooking,” she said. Home is near Oxford, within striking distance of the market towns and villages she clearly relishes, and she sums up family life simply as “quite feral.”
