Lloyds Bank and Google Cloud are deepening a multiyear partnership that aims to bring AI into insurance underwriting and risk prevention. 

The two talked about the partnership alongside insurance company The Hartford in what they are calling the first “tripartite” collaboration between the marketplace, a technology provider outside the industry and a market participant.

The partnership centers on Lloyd’s Lab, the insurance marketplace’s biannual startup accelerator now in its 16th cohort, which has increasingly focused on operational efficiency rather than customer-facing tools, according to Dawn Miller, chief executive of Lloyds USA, said during the U.S. Insurtech Showcase in New York on June 8. 

About half of the current cohort’s companies are centered on efficiency gains, said Rohit Bhat, managing director of financial services at Google Cloud. That represents a shift from earlier insurtech waves that focused primarily on the customer-facing front end. 

“I think everyone thinks about words that I would call boiling the ocean — reimagine, modernize, completely rethink the business structure,” Bhat said.  

“What was surprising is nearly half of the cohort is almost entirely focused on, ‘Hey, there is a lot to be gained if we’re able to drive operational efficiencies using these technologies.’” 

AI in underwriting 

One of the biggest areas of AI use in insurance can be underwriting, Bhat said. 

He said Google contributes to the partnership across three areas — Google Cloud’s platform, its research divisions in climate and geospatial analysis and Google DeepMind’s AI capabilities. 

AI is being used to solve two longstanding modeling problems, Bhat said: determining which risk variables matter through large-scale back-testing and reasoning across adjacent data sets — weather, imagery, land records — to build more precise loss curves for individual properties. 

“This combination of ‘are we looking at the right elements’ and ‘is there any value in looking at more elements’ combined with being able to now put that in the right context — that’s where AI, the thinking capabilities and the reasoning capabilities, are playing a heavy role,” he said. 

Efficiency gains in financial services 

Google Cloud is seeing measurable gains in call center performance across its broader financial-services customer base, Bhat said.  

“In financial services, what I can tell you is {with} handle times, we are seeing double-digit  — near 30% — reduction on what it takes to go from the time a call has come in to the time it’s being serviced,” he said.  

Google also is seeing a reduction in the number of back-and-forth exchanges needed to resolve a customer inquiry, he added. 

Shifting from claims to prevention 

Mo Tooker, president of insurance company The Hartford, framed the partnership around a broader industry shift from paying claims to preventing them. 

Roughly two-thirds of the insurer’s property and casualty claims are preventable, he said, citing telematics and water sensors as established prevention tools and computer vision-based monitoring — for workplace ergonomics and hazard detection — as emerging tools. 

The companies also are co-developing an AI-driven tool to deliver hyper-personalized risk guidance to small business owners, tailoring advice to factors including a specific business location, staffing and local weather exposure rather than generic industry categories, Tooker said. 

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