Insurance Taskmaster: Insuring the Titanic (1912)
Insurance Post and Verisk tasked six industry rising stars to solve some of the biggest historic challenges faced by the market over the past two centuries.
In this episode, the contestants are catapulted back to January 1912 to meet the Insurance Taskmaster, today playing the role of Wilfred Green, an employee of Willis Faber & Co. Green has been sent to Lloyd’s of London to seek insurance for a new ‘unsinkable’ liner called the Titanic and her sister ship, the Olympic, on behalf of the White Star Line.
The Taskmaster contestants now have just one hour to compete with each other to come up with the most comprehensive insurance and risk management offering for the £1m slip attributed to Lloyd’s.
At its core, insurance designed to protect against large, unexpected losses, even when those losses are as unthinkable as the sinking of the Titanic. Insuring something of that scale and expense was unprecedented back then, and the vessel ended up underinsured.
In the last 100 years, insurance has become much more sophisticated and we have access to data and analytics that make specialist risk much more easily quantified and managed. Lloyd’s of London is still the world’s largest insurance marketplace where many difficult and high-risk exposures find coverage.
Verisk supports the Lloyd’s and wider London Market with a variety of policy forms and language, underwriting tools and data, and reinsurance management software. Available to all Lloyd’s Syndicates, Verisk underpins many pricing decisions through the dedicated Lloyd’s Portal.