WTW has outlined its strategy to embed claims expertise throughout the risk transfer process – not just at the end.

Global claims head Neil Harrison, who joined the global broker in April after 37 years at Aon, told insuranceNEWS.com.au during a recent visit to Sydney that “the complexity of claims is increasing significantly”.

“If we take a step back and look at the risk landscape that we’re all in today, there’s increasing global connectivity, increasingly litigious environments – including here in Australia – significant political volatility and regulatory evolution,” he said.

But “the more important piece of the puzzle” is how WTW uses claims expertise to inform product innovation and policy development.

“How we use claims data in a strategic way, how we partner with insurers around the claims process to take out frictional cost, how we use the claims performance and approach of insurers as part of the market selection process.”

US-based Mr Harrison says WTW wants to go beyond the traditional view of claims where “client has claim, broker gets involved, tries to bring resolution, closes the file and moves on”.

“We recognise the importance of claims throughout the value chain, not just as a response to an event. That’s very much what we’re going to be bringing to the fore in this market and globally.”

He stresses the importance of specialisation in claims “to make sure our clients and our insurer partners benefit from specialised knowledge. We are not huge believers in diluting that expertise and making this a generalist conversation. And I think that does a bit of a disservice to the client base overall if we were to move in that direction.”

Mr Harrison flags cyber as a key risk, and says he is “not sure we’re ready” as a global community for a genuinely catastrophic loss.

“We’re still learning what that risk really is. We’re still learning about what the level of threat is. We’re still learning about what the economic impact of that risk, when it hits, is.”

He describes the recent CrowdStrike outage as “a near miss”.

“That brings to the fore the need for proper evaluation of policy wordings. What is it that we’re actually selling, and how will it respond?

“And how is the claims process set up to support clients when such an event does happen?

“The ‘what could have been’ is also really a claims issue when you think about it. And what we’re trying to do at WTW is think about all of these things in partnership with clients, but also in partnership with insurers.”

Look out for the October/November edition of Insurance News magazine, which features an in-depth interview with WTW’s new head of Australia and New Zealand James Baum