Neil Chapman, senior director of insurance, consulting and technology at Willis Towers Watson, discusses how analytics is impacting the insurance sector and how the provider is continuing to develop its machine learning and artificial intelligence tools
What expertise can Willis Towers Watson offer insurers?
Here at Willis Towers Watson's insurance consulting and technology (ICT) division, we deliver specific solutions for the insurance industry. One of our main strengths is the combination of our consulting and technology offering. That is fairly different to many of our competitors, with most majoring on either the technology or consultancy side, whereas we place equal emphasis on both. Indeed, our internal consultants play an important role in giving us client and their own feedback to enhance our technology offering.
Winning analytics solution of the year for Radar in the InsuranceERM Awards 2020 underlines how this approach supports our clients. The Radar suite offers not only advanced analytics decision support to insurers, but enables effective and quick execution of those decisions. The private motor insurance sector is a prime example of the current focus on pricing analytics and delivery whereby many insurers want to be able to better leverage data and new machine learning applications. We are also seeing increased interest in applying the same techniques within life insurance, commercial lines insurance and the claims space.
What features will Willis Towers Watson add to its Radar software?
We are working on a new tool called Radar AI. It is focused on the automation of building and maintaining machine learning models, to complement our existing machine learning capabilities.
That is currently in development and we are looking to launch it later this year.
Radar has already enabled our clients to increase their adoption of machine learning and embed this within their businesses by making it easier and more accessible to apply these techniques.
Whilst these approaches get a lot of focus, leveraging this pricing sophistication within a business context relies on having appropriate structures for decision making, governance and implementation - all of which Radar enables and which will continue to be central to future product development.
How is Willis Towers Watson harnessing artificial intelligence and machine learning to help insurers?
The understanding of what AI is and does is changing. To date, a lot of the focus has been on the application of machine learning models. We have looked at enabling access for insurers to those types of techniques. Going forward, there will be an increased focus on automation, making processes efficient and ensuring insurers provide value for their customers. Our Radar Live product within the software suite embodies those principles.
Pricing changes that previously could take insurers weeks, if not months, to implement can now be made in minutes. Whilst machine learning and AI get a lot of focus, let's not forget the application of wider analytical methods still offers real benefits to the insurance industry, particular in areas which historically have not embraced an analytical approach, such as commercial insurance or claims. AI is just one aspect of a wealth of growing analytics possibilities for insurers, and if AI is to revolutionise the insurance industry, it may be on a much longer timescale than people have anticipated.
How do the consulting services from Willis Towers Watson help insurers?
Our consultants only work in the insurance sector, so they know the industry, the trends and are an important conduit between us and our clients on how they can use technology to respond or seek a competitive edge. As an example, our consultants have been involved in a lot of discussion across the industry in the last year about digital transformation, including increasingly with commercial lines insurers who see the potential benefits of taking a less incremental approach to how they want to manage their business.
With a number of insurers engaging in large-scale IT transformation projects, our consultants are at the forefront of supporting them to achieve their strategic goals. Automation is one topic that is coming up. For some, it is about creating efficiencies, while for others it is not about a cost-cutting exercise, but about being able to do things better and provide a better client experience.