Logicalis

Lloyd’s 21st century vision helps broker new contacts and new deals

The Client

Since its early days in a 17th century coffee shop, Lloyd’s of London has consistently proved that it can respond quickly to change and meet customer demands. The world’s leading insurance brand, Lloyd’s is not an insurance company, but a society of 46 managing agents and 75 syndicates. It offers an unrivalled concentration of specialist underwriting expertise and talent. It covers the world’s most complex and specialist insurance risks – from oil rigs to celebrity body parts, from major airlines to the world’s biggest banks and sporting events. Its underwriters are renowned for devising tailored, innovative solutions to complex problems.

The Challenge

The underwriting floor is the heart and soul of Lloyd's, host to more than 4000 visiting brokers every day. During a routine tour of the floor, a casual aside from Lloyds CEO, Richard Ward, sparked a radical change in the way Lloyd's communicates with its members.

“He just asked if our screens could be modernised. They looked very dull, old-fashioned, and unbranded. All we used them for was to display black-and-white messages from the Corporation to the brokers about the status of the underwriting queues. It really was a waste of visual space,” says Lloyd's IT architect, Craig Carter.

Lloyd's had 58, 32-inch LCD screens distributed around the underwriting floor, showing very basic information with images fed from PCs running Microsoft ® PowerPoint. Lloyd's used the screens to inform brokers when appointments were due.

The firm also had a touch-screen kiosk in the reception area, along with TV screens in the 11 th floor executive suites, fed by an IP TV system to display the latest news from top financial institutions and broadcasters.

Lloyds wanted to introduce a new system that would continue to provide the same messaging and IP TV facilities, but would also deliver extra, enhanced content, styled and branded to reflect Lloyd's up-market, professional image. They wanted the flexibility to change and selectively feed content at will across the whole network of screens – and be able to upload their own videos promoting fundraising initiatives, seminars and other vital facts and figures.

The screens were to bring all the latest financial news from Lloyds and around the world to thousands of people on the underwriting floor.

The Solution

After a thorough evaluation of the market, Lloyd's asked Logicalis to integrate its existing Cisco network and IP TV feeds with Cisco's brand new Digital Media Solution (DMS).

 “Cisco had the best solution for us: it was network-based, hardware agnostic and offered lower power consumption and maintenance overhead. We were comfortable with their products and Logicalis, having been closely involved in developing and supporting our Cisco network, was the obvious choice as an integration partner,” says Craig Carter.

Logicalis proposed a solution that would utilise the firm's existing Cisco IP infrastructure to manage and deliver media content. By replacing the PC feeds with digital signage feeds, Lloyd's would be able to deliver rich, dynamic content including TV/satellite images, text tickers, flash animations, standard and high definition video, web content, and more – all of which could be instantly updated across groups of or individual signs, and scheduled to play at specific times.

With DMS, specialised server-based software – the Digital Media Manager (DMM) – is used to schedule which content goes to which set of screens and when, and to switch the screens on and off. Lloyd's can program the system to deliver something different to each screen in a group or “pod” of four screens, so that there is always something new and interesting for people to see.

The DMM software, hosted on a dedicated Cisco MCS server, is an easy to use, web-based application for organising, scheduling and publishing digital media to digital signage displays. It is envisaged that content authors - in this case Lloyd's waiters, marketing, HR and PR personnel - will be able to manage, schedule and publish digital media to the firm's digital signage displays.

Each of the 58 LCD screens has a networked Digital Media Player (DMP) attached to handle the display and playback of high resolution video and web content. Web designers Outbound provided the content and screen layouts as web pages and Logicalis programmed the DMM to address and upload certain pages according to a schedule using server-based software. The first of its kind in Europe, it was a challenging project that broke new ground.

“We were pushing the boundaries, but once we connected up all the right people, and Logicalis created a special test lab to soak test the schedules before going live, we managed a very successful deployment and went live in February 2008,” said Craig Carter.

The project has given a whole new look and feel to the underwriting, reception and executive areas. The screens switch on and off automatically, depending on their location and content, saving power and environmental costs.

“Everything now looks very smart, professional and clearly Lloyds branded. Simple touches such as changing the colour of the border daily, help to keep the content looking fresh,” says Craig Carter.

The Outcome

Since the system was implemented, reliability has been excellent. Lloyd's has the flexibility to mix news feeds with specific content to advertise lunchtime talks, give presentations on new regulations and key issues, and report the latest Lloyd's and other financial news. Now, the firm is looking for other innovative content to play out in its City of London premises, with plans to extend the service to other Lloyd's premises around the world.

The Lloyd's business team is delighted.

“Brokers spend a great deal of time waiting around to see an underwriter and the DMS is a great way of keeping them informed with topical and relevant news, views and events,” explains Craig Carter. “They continue to do an excellent job for the waiters with the message ticker, but they now do so much more, adding value to members' subscriptions. Our original goal was to modernise the look of Lloyds. Not only has the new system done this brilliantly, it has opened up so many more opportunities for communicating with our members.”