Contracts are an essential and fundamental component of commerce and society, serving to clarify agreements between multiple parties. While digital technologies have helped to automate many activities associated with contracting, the contracts themselves continue, in the main, to be in the form of unstructured, natural language text. This limits the scope for improvements in productivity and automation, as well as the emergence of new business models. To this end, this seminar will explore the concept of “computable contracts” as objects that are understandable by both humans and computers, and explore how these concepts can be applied in the financial services space, and particularly for commercial insurance.
With a strong science and technology background and for over two decades, John Cummins has led a diverse range of innovative initiatives in collaboration with universities and companies. In 2015, he co-founded the Legal Technology Laboratory in the US (www.thelegaltechlab.com) to bring lawyers and computer scientists together on cutting-edge legal tech projects. John is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in UCL's Computer Science Department and has been working with the members of the Financial Computing and Analytics Group since 2018 to develop a deeper understanding of computable contracting approaches in the financial services sector. In 2020, he co-founded Axiome Partners (www.axiomepartners.com), an insurtech start-up with the objective of establishing computable contracting approaches in the commercial insurance sector. John is also an advisor to the Codex Insurance Initiative at Stanford University at Stanford University. John has a Masters Degree in Engineering from Brunel University in the UK and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft in Germany.
