Bart Patrick, Managing Director, Europe for Duck Creek really understands the demands of the industry and the sometimes fractious and strained relationship with technology that it has had over the years.

Well all of that is changing and this discussion is all about how that is going to come about.

With the advent of cloud computing the industry finally has an opportunity to leave technology to the experts and simply get on with doing what it does best – market, transact and execute innovative insurance deals.

In this brave new world, the software and systems we use are becoming simply a utility that we can avail ourselves of and don’t have to own and maintain anymore.

What’s more the best platforms can now allow us to configure them in the way we want to work and let us plug in any of the tools we want to use to help us do our jobs better and compete in the marketplace. This is what people are describing as an ecosystem.

But transitioning away from legacy systems that are in fact many systems all bolted together is not easy, particularly if we have limited budgets and the massively important requirement that nothing falls over while we are making the switch to the new way of working.

Technical debt is the difference between what you should be spending on innovation and the amount of money you are spending on just keeping the old inefficient systems running.

This talk explains how to get out of this debt.

My role in this discussion is to be the layman with insurance knowledge and make sure Patrick doesn’t get bogged down in technical jargon.

Luckily Patrick is a great explainer who knows how to talk to insurance people.

I recommend this podcast to anyone wanting to gain a broad understanding of what our legacy industry tech problems are, where the future lies and more importantly, how we are going to get there.