There are likely few practitioners in the market who can attest to the ‘slow but steady’ approach required to bridge the gap between underwriting and data science as keenly as WTW’s director of digital underwriting, insurance consulting and technology Tasha Pettet (pictured).
Pettet joined the insurance market over two decades ago in an underwriting capacity before she moved into the digital trading sphere in the mid-2000s. Over the last 15 years or so, she has seen some great pockets of success in the move to digital across the market, she said, but there’s still a way to go before the whole market follows suit. What her time in digital trading has shown her, however, is that despite the challenges that come with transitioning to digital, it really is worth the effort.
She arrived at WTW about three years ago, having co-founded several successful digital MGA ventures across the market and took on her role with the ambition of helping the business further evolve the pace and appetite for digitisation in the commercial lines market.
“WTW has a hugely successful pricing and analytics tool called Radar which was born from personal lines application,” she said. “About eight years ago, the company took it into the commercial underwriting arena and then they brought me on board to help represent the commercial underwriting user. We’re exploring ‘how can we think like our customers and adapt the tool to make it attractive to them?’ So, I joined to develop a product called Radar Workbench which takes all the clever stuff we can do in Radar and makes it highly intuitive to a commercial underwriter.”
At its core, it’s as much about changing mindsets as it is processes, and what Pettet and the WTW team are essentially driving is a change management journey. You can’t expect somebody to go from a certain way of doing things to a completely new way overnight, she said - it would be overwhelming.
Creating such an intuitive, user-friendly interface comes with its challenges as it’s really about bridging the gap between underwriting and actuary and data science, which remains a sizeable gulf. And, as both sides of the equation have such a significant part to play in the insurance value chain, her role is to facilitate collaboration and understanding between them. It’s a real journey, she said, because both groups host people who are really deep domain experts at what they do.
“What we’d really like to do is to start underwriters thinking more analytically, and analysts thinking more from the perspective of the business user, and for these groups of people to have an environment where they can collaborate more,” she said. “Because I believe that diversity of thinking is critical to solving some of the problem statements we have in commercial insurance and some of those things that have held us back from embracing technology and analytics as quickly as our cousins in financial services.”
Utilising experiences she has gained from working in a multitude of roles across the insurance ecosystem, Pettet knows what it takes to generate a strong, consistent and pleasant user journey for the underwriter. It comes down to being empathetic to the challenges they’re experiencing, she said, and freeing them up so they can start to collect more data and feed that data back to the pricing teams, who can then interrogate that data in their databases.
“That’s what then gives us that continued evolution of models because the underwriters are at the coalface,” she said. “They’re in the market, getting the information from the brokers and they’re trading. But then that information is locked in their heads, or a spreadsheet somewhere. We want that information to flow back to the rest of the organisation. It’s not about close monitoring of what people are doing, but rather having a free flow of the market intelligence because that enables continuous evolution.”
Exploring how far along the insurance market is on that journey, Pettet said it seems the pandemic has moved the dial slightly as it has encouraged everybody to become more familiar, if not more comfortable, with technology. Technology now underpins everybody’s daily lives in a way that it simply didn’t pre-COVID. In addition, she said, there’s an enhanced understanding across the market of the need for participants to have a real grip on their portfolios given the potential for latent exposures that could come back to bite them if they don’t have their data available in a structured, quickly accessible format.
COVID and the business interruption insurance wordings debacle was a pressing example of this. Not being able to just press a button and generate all the available information to enable an accessible overview of all your exposures across your whole portfolio was a real blind spot. Being able to store data and structure data appropriately, and to collect that data and transact information digitally is a key step towards erasing that issue – and fulfilling Pettet’s ambition for the marketplace. But while the market is moving in the right direction with some good inroads being made at Lloyd’s and with ACORD, she highlighted there is still a way to go.
“Lots of focus has been on post-bind activities, which is once the policy has been incepted, and about the processes that are then subsequently involved,” she said. “But what I’d love to see is a bit more focus on structured messaging pre-bind, that’s what allows underwriters to actually assess and price the risk in the first place. As a market, I’d love to see us moving towards more digital standardisation of that.
“I think we can get in our own way sometimes because we worry about our competitors seeing the questions we’re asking, and we don’t want to share. But I don’t think that the clever stuff is in the message, I think that happens at either end of that message, whether it’s broking or underwriting. It’s how then to use, construct, report on and analyse that data. The thing that’s in the middle is just an enabler, in my view. And the quicker that we get to that, as a market, the better off we will be because we’ll truly be able to take advantage of the technology that’s out there.”
