At the centre of the discussion is a myth that rarely gets challenged directly: the idea that mandating a new system is enough to drive adoption. Drawing on his experience watching initiatives like Blueprint Two and Connect from the inside, Mark argues that compulsion only works once a technology has already proved itself to the people using it. Until that point, the market will find ways to work around it, however well-intentioned the mandate.
The conversation moves through the broker consolidation of the nineties, the insurtech hype wave, and the current rush to attach AI to everything, with Mark drawing a consistent thread through all of it. Technology succeeds in insurance when it genuinely makes someone's working day easier or more profitable, not because a central body has decided it should. He is broadly optimistic about where digital trading and agentic AI could take the London market, particularly if they help bring down the cost of capital and open the market to higher volumes of lower-value risk. But he is equally clear that regulatory accountability is not going anywhere, and that the market's instinct to trust relationships over systems is not the obstacle it is sometimes made out to be.
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