Katie Davies, Director of Underwriting Services and Fraud at Ageas Insurance, discusses the value and benefits of WTW’s Radar software…
Radar is a complete, end-to-end analytics and model deployment solution. Built specifically for insurers by insurance experts, and continually enhanced by on-going investment, development and innovation.
Radar is licensed by over 500 different companies and 23/25 of the world’s largest insurance groups.
KATIE DAVIES: Ageas has had a good couple of years and delivered some really great results. And Radar is one of the factors that's helped contribute to that success.
I'm Katie Davies. I'm director of underwriting services and fraud at Ageas. And among other things, I'm responsible for strategic change in underwriting, which for us includes simplifying our architecture, investing in our people, data, and technology.
We found Radar Live SaaS ticked a number of boxes for us compared to other solutions that we looked at. Radar is a proven solution that works in the UK market and that gave a level of credibility and gave us confidence that it could deliver what we needed. We needed a solution that could host all of our products, including risk and retail rates in our direct channel. And also given the wide range of brokers that we work with and the unique data that they all bring, we needed a solution that could cope with the high level of variation that we need to support our brokers and allow them to give the best price to their customers.
Also, given we operate on price comparison websites, we have to respond really quickly to a high volume of quotes. So having a system that can stand up to that and ensure the environment was stable enough to be able to offer quotes back to our customers and brokers really quickly, in under a second. We've worked with WTW in the past and they know the UK market really well, so we trusted them to deliver what was needed.
2023 was a challenging inflationary environment in the UK and agility in our rating was key in helping us navigate that. We found that we were able to quickly adapt our rating, apply new models that help risk selection, and that helped us prevent price shock. It meant we were delivering accurate rates to our brokers and customers at any point in time.
From a business perspective, this helped us grow the number of customers we have, helped us increase our broker panel shares, and it has also really helped with customer retention across our direct and broker channels. And we've been really pleased at Ageas, with the growth that we've seen in the last 18 months since we went live.
Being able to test rates more effectively, monitor them really closely has meant that we've got more confidence in those rates, which is particularly important in the regulatory environment we operate in. And secondly, and perhaps unexpected, is the impact it's had on staff retention. We've got some really brilliant pricing analysts and data scientists who are always curious and learning new techniques. And it's great for them to use the new tools and see the models that they've developed to be able to go live and have a positive impact on the business that we're writing. And that has really helped our staff engagement and also our employee retention.
Ageas has had a good couple of years and delivered some really great results. And Radar is one of the factors that's helped contribute to that success. We really value our partnership with WTW, and we really look forward to continuing to build our capability with them for Ageas and for our customers.
