The London market’s digital overhaul is often discussed in abstract terms, target operating models, core data records and heritage mainframes. For Wesley Atack (pictured), London Market solution portfolio owner at SCOR, it is a story told in systems wiring, underwriting workflows and the stubborn reality of unstructured data.
Atack’s route into that world was anything but linear.
“I actually started in insurance in Germany with Allianz as part of a university work-placement year,” he recalled. “I studied German as part of my degree, and we had an exchange with Allianz in Germany. About nine of us went out there for a year to improve our German skills and to work. That was my first foray into insurance.”
Restructuring and limited prospects eventually persuaded him to move on from his love of Germany. There were various opportunities including one very tempting one in Belgium, however, the return to London proved more persuasive. Back in the City, he joined Canopius in the Lloyd’s building in a management information role.
A move to Australia followed when his wife was headhunted. “We moved out to Australia and I went to work for one of the cover-holders that Canopius was insuring,” he said. “I did that for three and a half years, still within the Lloyd’s market, so everything was still ultimately coming back to London.” The couple decided that distance from family was too great and returned to London, re-entering a market still digesting the aftermath of the financial crisis.
Spells at Argenta and then Capsicum Re broadened his exposure to London market projects and Broking. Then at Tokio Marine he helped implement a new delegated authority system before a change of direction towards a Deloitte solution prompted another move.
His next step was into what was then The Channel Managing Agency backed by SCOR. Hired under the banner of systems implementation, he was quickly recast by the CIO as a kind of organisational “glue”, helping to connect multiple change initiatives in a growing business. Seven years on, that remains the essence of his remit.
“Over the last few years, we’ve been integrating with the SCOR Group. That came to a head around March 2025,” he explained. “I was initially sitting between IT and the business, now I am assigned to group IT, with a focus that is still SCOR Syndicate and London market–focused.”
Atack has watched the London market’s modernisation drive at close quarters, from early work on the London Target Operating Model. From his vantage point, the transformation has been stark.
From a syndicate point of view, the market has moved from a largely paper-based, face-to-face environment, conducted almost entirely within the Lloyd’s building, to something quite different. Before the pandemic, there was already discussion of digitalisation, particularly around capturing data once and avoiding re-keying, but adoption was patchy.
The arrival of COVID-19 forced a step change. Digital marketplaces ceased to be an optional experiment and became the only viable route to trade. Electronic placing platforms such as PPL and Whitespace became central to day-to-day underwriting.
More recently, Atack suggests, the real battleground has shifted from pure digitisation of placement to whether the data being captured can be used effectively. The challenge lies in structural consistency. With multiple brokers using different subsets of fields on e-placing platforms, the proportion of data that is populated in a standard form can be small, undermining the business case for deeper automation.
Whitespace has pushed standardisation through templating; PPL has been moving in a similar direction. SCOR’s managing agency has been aligning with those market-wide efforts and assessing how far the resulting data can be harnessed internally. Nonetheless, Atack acknowledges that the current state is still in infancy: digital processes overlay, rather than replace, manual workflows, creating duplication, reconciliation work and cost.
The destination he has in mind is clear. “The holy grail is that the client provides digital data, the broker packages and sends it to market,” he said. “The carriers receive the information digitally and nobody has to re-key it into their systems. It just goes straight through.”
Blueprint Two is central to that ambition. “Blueprint Two is a Lloyd’s flagship market modernisation project,” Atack explained. “The idea is to enhance the interface between underwriters, brokers and carriers so that there is less re-keying, fewer data errors and so that data can flow more freely and more quickly.”
“A lot of the systems used by what is now DXC (also the London market’s central services provider) are quite old and needed modernising,” he noted. As part of BluePrint2, “they’re moving from old mainframe machines to newer technology. That newer technology allows you to do newer and more advanced things.”
The scale of the undertaking, and the number of actors involved, make this slow work. “Thankfully, that’s not my role, that’s handled at the market level,” he said. “But it is very difficult. There are so many different parties. We’ve got something like 50 managing agencies, and more than 400 registered brokers. They all want things done in particular ways or need to fit changes into their own systems.”
“There’s a plethora of broker systems and policy administration systems on the carrier side. It’s a huge undertaking, and that’s why it takes so long,” he added. “Not everybody can move at the same speed. You have big brokers saying, ‘We can throw money and people at this,’ and you have smaller brokers saying, ‘Hold on, don’t leave us behind.’ The same is true on the carrier side.”
Lloyd’s has tried to manage that through structured engagement. “They had community leaders working with carriers, grouped by the systems or suppliers they use,” Atack said. “For example, everyone using DXC systems would be managed by one person; we would feed back to them and they would feed back to Lloyd’s. It was a good model, with some strong feedback loops.”
Even so, he has perceived a loss of momentum. “From the market’s perspective, over the last six to nine months we’ve seen a bit of a slowdown in progress,” he said. “We’re getting fewer updates and fewer progress reports.”
SCOR’s London platform has adopted a realistic stance on where it can and cannot lead. “From the syndicate perspective, rather than the group, we’ve followed rather than driven, given the size and scale of the managing agency,” Atack said.
“We set out a vision to follow the market with digital transformation and the implementation of e-placing platforms,” he explained. “Getting on board with those platforms was probably the biggest step. That changed underwriting and changed how we think about digital data.”
“The second major initiative, which we’re still in the middle of, is our work around APIs, looking at what the data is, how we get to that data, and what we do with it,” he added.
Within the managing agency, the emphasis has been on integration. “What we’ve implemented on a small scale within the managing agency is connecting systems together: the disparate e-placing platforms, multiple administration systems, claims systems, and then feeding information back and forth to our suppliers and outsourcers,” Atack said. “We have focused our syndicate developments on the integration points between systems because there is where the money lies.”
Much of this work has been handled internally. “We’ve done most of it ourselves, to be fair,” he said. “We have a small development team that creates simple applications and workflows to knit systems together.”
Beyond the firm, he participates in wider market forums. “I also participate in the Next-Gen COO Group, which is a Lloyd’s market group, where we exchange ideas and support the LMA OC,” he noted. “In those groups, we talk about initiatives that are underway, how we think we can help the market with digital processes, and we try to follow through on ideas that come out of those discussions.”
Within SCOR’s London operation, digital change has reconfigured the demands on underwriting and data functions more than it has altered the fundamental skill set in IT.
Technologists, Atack observes, are naturally inclined to adopt new tools and techniques. Market working groups, internal workshops and online courses have sustained a gradual evolution of capability without the need for radical retraining.
For underwriting teams, by contrast, the shift from paper files to digital submissions has transformed both workload and workflow. Rather than dealing with a smaller number of carefully targeted approaches from brokers, underwriters can now find themselves confronted with thousands of quotes each week. The ability of brokers to broadcast opportunities to a broad panel at minimal cost has fundamentally changed the demand side.
In response, SCOR has introduced more structured, rules-based processes and supporting systems to screen and route incoming material, ensuring that underwriting attention is directed where it can add most value and that capacity is not overwhelmed by volume.
For all the attention AI has received, Atack’s approach is pragmatic.
“There are lots of things you can do with AI,” he said. “Our focus so far has been on things we can automate quickly, some quick wins at the top layer.”
“For development, for example, if you need something very quickly, a workflow or a small piece of code, you can get that reasonably easily from tools like GitHub Copilot, or similar. Developers can decide where to go for that kind of support,” he explained.
“Then there’s the more interesting AI use: using AI to build or fundamentally change what we do. We haven’t gone that far yet,” he said. “That level of AI requires larger investment in time, resources and money and is best done with a global vision and sharing of capabilities.”
At group level, SCOR is investing, but in a targeted fashion. “SCOR Group is investing in AI, but we are starting by laying the foundations,” Atack said. “We are not running full-steam ahead and throwing AI at problems just to see what happens. We know what AI is capable of and maturing very fast, but to use it properly we need the right foundations. We need to make sure the data is right and underlying processes are efficient and effective.”
“Our AI strategy therefore sits with the Data & AI Team, collaborating closely with IT and the Transformation team,” he added. “All the information is being collated, cleansed, checked and confirmed and processes optimised. That all has to happen first. Then we can put AI over the top and say, ‘Run through this clean, structured data and tell us what insights we can draw and how we can manage processes even better.’”
Experiments with chatbots have highlighted the risks of cutting corners. “We’ve tried chatbots for some applications. We pointed them at our documentation and said, ‘Go,’” he said. “The results were mixed. Some were okay; others gave wrong answers because the documentation was outdated or too complex for the model to handle.”
“So, it’s all about getting the foundation right,” he concluded. “From a syndicate perspective, we haven’t engaged deeply with AI yet. Together with SCOR Group we will push forward and develop new more efficient and effective ways of working leveraging our joint capabilities and insights and connect it all to the needs of our clients.”
He characterises SCOR’s current position as foundational. “I would say we’re at the upskilling phase,” Atack said. “There are lots of initiatives in IT, especially at group level, where people are looking at AI. We’re recruiting for AI positions and making sure we have the skills so that when the foundations are ready, we can move quickly.”
“You can think of it in two main strands,” he added. “First, AI on top of data, for data and insights. AI will comb through data and highlight things we might not have discovered manually, or conclusions we might not have reached because doing that work by hand would be too time-consuming. Second, process improvement. AI can learn from how we do things now, or we can train it to perform processes we do a thousand times a day but don’t really need to be doing manually.”
Organisationally, Atack’s unit now sits firmly within SCOR’s Group IT structure. In London, he oversees a compact team: a pair of developers focusing on workflows & system integration and a systems analyst for the main Policy Admin system. They work closely with the Syndicate Business Intelligence Team, increasingly bringing Syndicate data in-line with group standards and priorities. Above, lies a substantial global technology organisation numbering in the hundreds, which drives major platform decisions and group-level initiatives.
London’s role is to act as a specialised node within that network, close to the Lloyd’s market and its particularities, but connected to and supported by SCOR’s global resources.
Looking ahead, Atack returns repeatedly to the concept of a usable core data record and genuinely digital submissions from brokers as the most important enablers of further progress.
He envisages a market in which brokers hold structured data and transmit it in a standard form, allowing carriers to ingest it directly into policy administration systems without re-keying or duplication. Internal processes would then be able to operate largely without manual intervention, with underwriters focusing on risk selection and pricing rather than remediation of data flows.
He is confident that this aspiration is widely shared across the market. The real difficulty, as he sees it, lies in execution: aligning brokers, managing agents and syndicates behind concrete steps that turn that shared vision into reality.
For now, SCOR’s London operation will continue to prioritise connecting systems, improving data quality where possible, and preparing for a more AI-enabled future, closely connected with the broader SCOR Group transformation programmes.
As London Market Solution Portfolio Owner, he remains focused on designing and overseeing solutions for the London platform, ensuring that systems and processes are properly integrated, and that digital initiatives deliver practical benefits to the business.
Away from work, Atack’s life is dominated by family commitments. He has two sons in their early teens, and much of his free time is spent ferrying them between football training, athletics, martial arts sessions and weekend matches. His own sporting loyalties were formed earlier. He grew up opposite a rugby club and attended a rugby school, and he has previously coached junior rugby at Saracens, after teaching Ballroom & Latin dancing since a young age as part of the family business.
The discipline, patience and forward planning that define his insurance work also underpin the way he nurtures and supports his family life.
