Insurance

We bring our clients industry expertise, strategic thinking, analytical insight and innovation to create tangible value for leading P&C, life and health insurers and reinsurers. Oliver Wyman’s Insurance practice operates broadly across three core areas: strategy, operations and finance. To every engagement, our firm draws on a growing and dynamic reservoir of intellectual capital, mining best practices globally to develop solutions that benefit our clients locally.

Strategy and Growth

As the insurance industry continues to consolidate and restructure, achieving profitable growth is key to long-term survival. Oliver Wyman combines strategic analysis tools with extensive information on different businesses, markets and value chain activities to help insurers design strategies that give them a competitive advantage.

Cost leadership
In today's weak economic environment, cost management is top of insurers' agendas. Oliver Wyman's differentiated approach to different areas of cost contrasts with the typical 'one size fits all' which often leads to failure, and instead delivers comprehensive, deep and sustainable cost management. Our framework distinguishes between six areas of cost which acknowledge the different levers along the value chain and the different cost drivers in each area.
 
Operational effectiveness
While insurers have developed bold strategies, many are struggling with translating these strategies into a daily reality - failed IT programs, turf wars or organizational inertia are still commonplace. Our approach to designing target operating models has enabled us to support our clients to deliver transformational change successfully. Starting from a deep understanding of strategy, we follow a stringent approach to design the necessary business architecture, business operating model, and finally the IT architecture and back the conceptional work up with the necessary change management.

Distribution and Marketing
Drawing on our management experience, our firm maximizes sales productivity, optimally configures distribution channels, and clearly delineates value propositions for our clients. Our expertise includes: improved targeting, sales processes, alignment of infrastructure and connecting sales, and pricing and service to improve profitability.

Product Development and Management
Through optimizing their product portfolio we help insurers to improve their economics and proposition to customers. We support clients to become more innovative, to bring ideas to market quickly, to effectively optimize the economics of individual products and the overall portfolio and to combine products into aligned customer propositions.

Underwriting and Pricing
Sustained underwriting profitability and differentiation is key to the success of many companies. We guide our clients to take advantage of customer behavior characteristics, to consider additional underwriting factors, to invest in product design/research, and to improve upon their negotiation/pricing resources.

Regulation
Oliver Wyman shapes the future of the industry, advising clients on regulatory issues and collaborating with regulators and other standard setters to develop solutions to complex industry issues.

Claims management
Our proprietary techniques identify sources of claims "leakage," including fraud, over-generous settlements, poor litigation management and inefficient claims handling. We structure solutions to improve processes and align an organization's management and incentives to support those improvements.

Financial effectiveness
Our cutting-edge analytics and pragmatic implementation optimize risk, capital and value management across many lines of business. We develop frameworks to measure profit, risk, capital usage, value creation and performance to assess and improve financial effectiveness to meet regulatory (e.g. Solvency II) requirements as well as to generate a sustained competitive advantage.

As well as measurement frameworks we work extensively to support risk and finance executives in establishing the processes, organization and infrastructure required to measure, control and steer the company's risk profile and to communicate the risk implications of the business strategy and planning. This includes setting overall risk appetite, determining the desired return for different risk classes and building a culture of risk awareness and clear communication both within the company e.g. at Board level and to external stakeholders.

Key Areas of Insight