Willis, a WTW business, has appointed Chris Mulligan (pictured) as global head of risk engineering, effective January 1, 2027. He will lead 200 risk engineers across 30 countries, working to connect engineering assessments with Willis’s data, analytics, and broking capabilities to give clients a clearer view of how exposures interact across their operations and portfolios.
Mulligan is an internal appointment who has spent more than 17 years at Willis in risk engineering roles, having joined in 2009. Before that, he spent eight years at Pfizer as a process engineer and deputy operations manager, working on high-hazard manufacturing environments where his responsibilities included HAZOP analysis, hazardous area classification, and safety management systems.
That background in operational risk inside a complex industrial site rather than in insurance frames what Willis is signalling with the hire. The risks named in the announcement as driving the need for stronger risk engineering are AI infrastructure, the energy transition, climate pressures, and interconnected supply chains. All of them engineering-intensive, all of them requiring someone who understands how physical systems fail before worrying about how to price that failure.
Mulligan steps into a role that Willis has been building toward since September 2025, when it formally launched its global risk engineering team under its risk and analytics division. That launch consolidated engineering capabilities across 30 countries and set out an ambition to deliver both single-site and portfolio-level assessments. Mulligan’s appointment completes the leadership layer on top of that structure, placing a named global head over a team that has been operating for just over a year.
He will report to Marc Hindman, North America leader of risk and analytics at Willis, who said Mulligan’s understanding of clients’ risks would help bring global capabilities closer together. Mulligan is based in London.
Risk engineering has historically sat at the margins of insurance broking. It is useful for underwriting surveys, occasionally deployed for major accounts, but rarely central to how a broker differentiates itself. Willis has been repositioning it differently. Its RiskIQ Nexus platform, launched in September 2026, consolidates policy, premium, loss, and exposure data from multiple sources into a single connected view for risk managers.
The engineering team’s role, as Willis frames it, is to make that view technically credible, not just a data aggregation exercise but one grounded in how exposures actually behave across a client’s operational footprint.
“Clients need more than a site-by-site view of risk," Mulligan said. "By connecting our engineering expertise with Willis’ leading data and analytics, we can clearly show how exposures interact across operations and portfolios, and help clients target investment, strengthen resilience and make better risk and insurance decisions.”
