Fifth Step attended the Monte Carlo 2018 Rendezvous to get the lowdown on what is happening in the complex world of reinsurance. The major story from our point of view was that Lloyd’s would reject any syndicate business plans that do not show a reduction in expenses for 2019, according to performance management director Jon Hancock who was talking to Insurance Insider magazine.
In recent years as it has become increasingly clear that technology, IT leadership and project management skills need to become an essential weapon in a modern insurance company’s armoury. That’s why I made a point of attending this year’s Monte Carlo Reinsurance Rendez-Vous to see if there was anything I could take away from the event that would be of interest to Fifth Step’s CIO and IT Leader clients, and which they should be aware of from RVS 2017.
Some insurers are implementing only the minimum data protection standards as required in a jurisdiction—but this approach will cause problems for them, according to Darren Wray, CEO of consultancy firm Fifth Step. Financial services companies need to get on the starting blocks in time for the GDPR in 2018 http://ow.ly/m3so30flwp4
In my last blog (https://www.fifthstep.com/node/213) I wrote that Cyber Security and Business Continuity should ideally work together to streamline a well-coordinated response to any attacks or data breaches, minimise costs and protect reputation. In this blog I will look at specific pragmatic actions that would be required to achieve this integration.
On the Saturday morning of the recent holiday weekend BA’s computer systems suffered an outage, the details are not public, although there is a suggestion that there was a power surge in one of BA’s data centers that caused damage to hardware. Whilst the why is important to BA’s technicians who will have been working all over the holiday weekend to resolve the issue and subsequent fallout, the more interesting lessons come from looking at what can be learned from the incident as a whole.