WTW: A model for successful outsourcing
The actuarial function is integral to key aspects of all insurers’ operations — reserving, pricing and underwriting, reinsurance and risk and capital — presenting opportunities to add value to an insurer’s performance or the wider business while still also meeting the regulatory requirements.
Insurers are faced with a number of challenges, including:
- Ever-shifting regulatory requirements
- Changes to financial reporting standards
- Tighter deadlines
- Need to keep pace with new technologies
- Fundamental changes in the market structure (such as the expansion of private capital-backed insurers)
- Need to scale actuarial teams
- Lack of access to deep expertise
- Need for increased efficiency
As a result, insurers are seeking advice and support in the transformation of their actuarial function, delivering the following benefits:
- Frees up critical actuarial resources
- Expands actuarial roles to allow greater focus on core competencies and high-value work
- Supports increased flexibility to scale operations quickly and easily
- Equips established insurers to update and streamline their own internal procedures, bridging the gap caused by legacy systems and the costs associated with maintaining them
- Enables companies to concentrate their valuable (and higher-cost) actuarial resources on pursuing new opportunities with higher returns
Leveraging our deep insurance industry expertise and talent, we work closely with insurers on outsourcing engagements to balance speed, cost and risk considerations to determine the pace of change and level of process transformation required to meet short- and long-term needs.
In a typical assignment, we provide nearshore resources to complete business-as-usual (BAU) tasks associated with financial reporting for a line of business, which free up company resources for higher priority work. Insurers benefit from our ability to scale up or down quickly and efficiently to meet their evolving needs.
We have acquired deep knowledge of the actuarial function requirements and are familiar with how the market approaches meeting them. We also have a dedicated product development team keeping abreast of market developments.
This experience puts us in an ideal position to support and advise our clients in respect of their actuarial functions.
- Design and implementation of actuarial functions
- Gap analyses between current and target operating models
- Technical provisions
- Underwriting and reinsurance opinions
- Risk management calculations or reviews
- Independent assessments
- Provision of a chief actuary
It also highlights software solutions such as ResQ, RiskAgility FM, Igloo, and Unify, which support the production or review of actuarial function reports.
As part of our comprehensive suite of services to help meet U.S. regulatory requirements and, in particular, the actuarial function, we also offer clients a high-level review and benchmarking service which aims to provide insight to help:
- Identify areas of improvement in your current set-up and processes
- Bring you into line with emerging market best practice
- Help make your actuarial processes more efficient
- Enable you to identify new ways to add value
