Sp Ep John Mason CEO Placing Platform Limited (PPL): 'It seems so obvious, why didn't we do it before?'

The Voice of Insurance

Today’s guest is quite out of the ordinary for the Voice of Insurance.

Normally guests on the podcast can recount multi-decade careers in insurance from the time they fell into the industry up to the present day.

Today’s guest is extraordinary because he is someone of vast experience in his field but who has only just been recruited into the insurance industry.

John Mason is the CEO of London Market electronic placing provider PPL and can boast a glittering career running the core systems and platforms that support hugely important global financial markets in other financial sectors outside of insurance.

From this encounter I can tell you straight away that I think that we have a lot more to learn from John than he does from us.

But thankfully for us John is not the sort of outsider who has come to lecture us on how to drag our antiquated trading systems into line with markets that fully digitised decades ago.

John is an experienced leader and the type of communicator who understands that a market that syndicates bespoke structured insurance coverage across the globe is bound to throw up many unique complications and challenges

He gets the tone just right – he is here to do an important job and he has a clear vision of how to go about it, but he is very conscious of the need to meet us where we are and show how tech is going to make the way we already work way more efficient and higher added value, rather than try and force us to completely change the way we do business.

And that’s where this extraordinary podcast adds its value. John is easily the most eloquent leader running a core insurance technology platform I have ever interviewed. He knows where the pitfalls lie and has the experience to know how to execute large, complicated, transformational projects.

He hasn’t been with us long, but the ideas we discuss in the time that follows are highly impressive and are set to transform frontline brokers’ and underwriters’ day-to-day relationship with the technology they use to carry out their jobs.

They could unleash a wave of productivity and creativity that would completely re-set the market’s relationship with itself and with the rest of the world.

It’s extraordinary stuff – but as I said at the beginning, John is very much out of the ordinary.

LINKS:

We mention a video that PPL has produced outlining the vision behind its recently-announced partnership with Microsoft. I highly recommend a view: https://vimeo.com/1017109828

https://placingplatformlimited.com