In this episode of Making Risk Flow, host Juan de Castro speaks with Jillian Slyfield, the Chief Innovation Officer at Aon, a global leader in risk management and insurance solutions, helping organisations tackle complex risks with innovative, data-driven approaches. With years of experience at the forefront of technological change, Jillian has a unique perspective on how data is reshaping the insurance landscape and driving new opportunities for clients and insurers alike.
Together, Juan and Jillian discuss Aon's three main strategic innovation focusses: enhancing data and analytics capabilities, advancing future mobility solutions, and driving digital transformation. Plus, the duo also cover Aon’s billion-dollar investment in data architecture modernisation, the growing complexities of managing risk as vehicle technology evolves, the development of a digital marketplace aimed at streamlining interactions between brokers, carriers, and clients, and the enticing potential of AI and telematics.
Listen to the full episode here
Juan de Castro: Hello, my name is Juan de Castro and you're listening to Making Risk Flow. Every episode, I sit down with my industry-leading guests to demystify digital risk flows, share practical knowledge, and help you use them to unlock scalability in commercial insurance. Jillian, thank you so much again for joining me today. Let's start with an overview of your role and your background.
Jillian Slyfield: Thanks for having me. First of all, it's really nice to be here. I'm Jillian Slyfield, Chief Innovation Officer for Aon. And my role at Aon is to look after investments that we make as a firm that have a timeline that might be three years, five years, sometimes even longer. I think what we've recognized as an organisation is that innovation comes in many forms. And as an organisation, we're very innovative. And most of that innovation comes from the field. In fact, I would say almost all of it does. It comes from our solution lines. It comes from our geographies. And we also recognize that innovation can be evolution, meaning we're taking some things that we do and making them just a little bit better all the time. And sometimes there are things we just can't do side of our desk. There are things that we need to make that extra effort for. And those are the things that largely come to myself and my team. But I also... Participate in the things that are focused on solution line geography. So I know we'll talk about some of those today, even though they may not be completely under my banner as Chief Innovation Officer. It's something as a firm that we're very collaborative on and contribute to organizationally.
Juan de Castro: So, you have a big role in a very large organisation. I believe Aon, well, it's probably the second largest global broker, over 50,000 employees. You've already touched on this, but you said a lot of innovation comes from the field. I'm sure from an executive committee, there are also other priorities. Have you got any defined process by which you capture some of those ideas or how do you identify where to focus on?
Jillian Slyfield: That's a great question. I think I've had the advantage of sitting in a lot of the seats that our colleagues sit in. So I've been an underwriter. I've been a producer. I've led those teams. I've been a sales leader. I've been an underwriting manager. I led a practice group, formed and led a practice group for Aon. And those experiences, I think, have really taught me that those great ideas are largely not going to come from our senior executives. They're going to come from our clients. And they're either going to come directly from our clients or they're going to come from our colleagues who are listening to our clients. So let me talk to you a little bit about the way we think about it, which is we want to be in response to client needs. And so our thought is our clients have ever-increasing expectations around what we do because they're constantly changing. So they've got changing business models. They've got a change in technology that they're either creating or responding to. Different social expectations are impacting them. There might be regularisation that's impacting them. And so we've got to really keep a pulse on what our clients are asking for. And we can do that through very formal ways. And we do, whether it's focus groups, specific conversations with key clients, things like that. But largely, it bubbles up from our colleagues who are in conversation with our clients that are saying, there is a need to address this particular risk issue, or we see something happening in a part of the market that we need to respond to. And we listen to those as an executive team and start to pull our colleagues together and have those conversations. Those could be industry leaders that hear from our colleagues who are part of the tech industry, as an example, or the construction industry, and really learning from what they do. So it all kind of bubbles up from the coming up. The other piece of it, honestly, is you'd be able to put your finger on some of the issues that we work on just as quickly as I could if you sat down and read the news over the course of a day. You say, what are the headline issues? Well, climate risk is a headline issue. Great. That's something that we're addressing at Aon. Artificial intelligence is a headline issue. That's something that we're addressing at Aon. If you're looking at what are these macroeconomic trends that are impacting our clients, where our industry, not just Aon, but like our industry isn't keeping up with product solutions, distribution channels, et cetera, to serve these new risk issues that are facing the clients. That's what we want to talk about. And then of course, there's a process for evaluating that, meaning it might be an interesting idea, but it also has to be something that adds an incredible amount of value for our clients and candidly for enough of our clients. It's usually not one client, although we hope to solve for that. But on our team, we're looking for things that are, again, kind of those macroeconomic trends where we can create something that impacts a number of clients across global geographies and across the firm.
Juan de Castro: So I'm sure you span your focus across many different areas, you've mentioned a few of them, but if you had to pick, what are the three key areas of strategic focus from an innovation perspective, like themes, perhaps you could call them themes. What would those be?
Jillian Slyfield: Maybe I'll start with something else if I can, because I was just thinking as you're saying that, to be clear, innovation from my perspective, it could be a lot of different things. It could be, do we need to innovate on policy? Meaning, do we need to innovate on coverage? Does a client need something that has previously been uncovered or not covered properly historically? Are we innovating on the way we're servicing business or a distribution channel? We need to think about that. Is it a short-term need or a longer-term need on behalf of the client? And the only reason I say that before I answer your question is I think for us, innovation is going to look like a lot of different things. Innovation isn't always like, here's a new insurance policy for you, but it might be, here's how we're delivering service to you differently today than we did before. And it adds more value to you as our client. So when I say that, I would say a lot of different priorities at Aon. But I think the three that would be, I think, interesting maybe for this audience: data and analytics, absolutely. Maybe number two might be future mobility. And three would be digitising facilities and how we're creating new marketplaces in our company. And they really represent different parts of our innovation journey as a firm.
Juan de Castro: So perhaps it would be very interesting to deep dive into each of those, which are like broad themes. So let's start with the first one, data and analytics. What are the types of challenges or pain points you've identified or want to address? And how are you thinking about how data and analytics can solve them?
Jillian Slyfield: So I always have thought it's interesting as an industry, we probably have as much, if not more data at our fingertips than almost any other industry globally. However, I think historically, we haven't done a great job of doing something with that data beyond broking an individual policy. Meaning if our client gives us information about their policy or we have claims data, what are we doing with that data that actually can provide insights back to our client that enables a better business outcome for them? And there's a lot of reasons for that. The data that we are getting comes in so many different forms. It's complicated. It comes in different forms from different places. Some of it we are able to utilise, some for privacy reasons we're not able to aggregate and utilise. As you and I have discussed previously in other conversations, we're kind of an industry of aggregators. There's a lot of acquisitions, there's a lot of growth in our industry. And so you end up with data pools. If I think of us as a broker, we have data pools that are historically challenging to use. And candidly, I'm not sure that our technology, even if you go back five years ago, the technology available to us didn't support creating better insights for clients. But I will say at the same time, our clients are asking us, placing the policy and even doing an excellent job at that is just not enough. They want greater insights to help them drive their business forward. They're seeing more volatility in their risk. There's more complexity in their risk. There isn't a client that doesn't have a global impact anymore. Maybe 20 years ago there was, but today, whether they actually have a footprint globally or not, they are impacted by global spheres. And so all of a sudden, the expectation of us is much higher to come to the table with tools and resources that help our clients make better decisions about their program, not just in the moment, certainly at the renewal, but the other 364 days a year as well. And so they're looking for those decision support tools. And you see it from other brokers, not just Aon, but other brokers as well. As other carriers saying clients are asking for more and we're now able to because technology is allowing us to come to the table. Greater tools, I think sometimes too, their risk issues are changing with our clients. So some of them that I had mentioned before, whether it's AI, or climate risk, but certainly cyber risk doesn't have to be on the risk capital side of the business, could be on the human capital, meaning the talent profile of our client companies has changed. And so as a result, our clients are looking for us to help them adjust, evolve, and accelerate their growth, not just protect what they had before. So that's where some of this has come from for us.
Juan de Castro: And that is very interesting because I was talking to a senior executive at a very large global technology company who is in charge for the risk managers, placing risk and interacting with brokers to get the right policy or right international program policies for them. And she mentioned that she couldn't understand why neither the broker or the insurer couldn't help her. One is to understand the risk. Second what is the view of the broker and the insurer on that risk? That makes the premium go up and down or be more expensive or less expensive. Almost give the client the tools to understand what is in their hands to be a better risk, which ultimately is in the best interest of everybody. And generally, she was saying she couldn't understand why that was not the case. And you mentioned privacy and regulations. That's obviously part of it. But what's your answer to that?
Jillian Slyfield: I think there's a couple of things. I don't think there used to be an expectation that was something that we offered to clients. The expectation used to be that we could place an insurance policy for a price that the client agreed was valuable and off you go. And then clients started asking more questions about it. They said, well, how do I become a preferred risk to this carrier? How do I know how I stack up against other clients? They're looking for information in return. They want more control over it. I think that kind of goes back to what I was saying before. It's like our clients are elevating their ask of us in this. How do I become a better risk? How am I evaluated in this? And it used to be like carriers were the black box. We give them data, they do whatever they do over there, and then they come back with a number and a structure. That is the old days. That's an unacceptable outcome for all of us. There's so much more transparency in the process, so much more. And I know we'll talk more about data analytics, but more data analytics that we can bring to the table so that clients have better tools and frankly, that clients can represent their own risk more favourably or candidly if they have risk issues that need to be addressed. They know what they are and they can start to say like, oh, OK, maybe I'm not the top risk in this category. This year, but I know what it takes now in order to do that. So it's like I said, it goes so far beyond that renewal information and more about what can we provide. I'll share a brief story with you because it's in the back of my mind. I was in my office yesterday and we were working on a large account and it's one of the major I would say it's a Fortune 50 company. So they have a huge risk profile and we've had an internal meeting about it. And one of the things that one of my colleagues said was that our client has historically not been willing to give us the data around a specific risk. And so we would need that data in order to provide them this data and analytics response that they want. So they want these insights, but in order to get the insights, we need the data. Historically, they haven't been willing to give us the data. And I said, well, I think we need to think about it differently because I hear this often from clients. Do I need to give up this data? I'm a big company. This is part of my IP. I don't want to give this up. The only reason they don't want to give it up is because they're not getting something strong enough in return. So if there's enough value on the other side, they would give us the data in a heartbeat if what we could give them back in return was something that they valued. I think what's happened with clients is there's times when they either hold back data or they limit what we get either from the worker side or the carrier =because what they get back from us isn't enough. And so I think we've got to up our game. And in this case, I think, stay tuned. If you ask me again in two weeks after I talk to the client, I'll have a better answer. But I think now we actually do have. Something that's of value to clients, like as an industry and certainly at Aon, I think now I can go to them in a way I couldn't three years ago and say, if you give me this data set, I can in return give you analytics that you will find valuable that help you drive your business, drive growth, reduce your risk, et cetera. So it's a trade-off.
Juan de Castro: So this is almost like a split responsibility between insurers and brokers, because I guess part of the insights the client is asking for probably needs to be provided by the insurer and part of it could be provided by the broker. So from the insurer, did you think about what are the rating factors? So what does have an impact on the premium? And there are things obviously outside of the control of the client, but there are things inside of the control of the client. Always a great example would be things like in cyber, there are risk controls or technical risk controls that the client can put in place that will make the premium be lower than if they don't have them. So do they, the obvious ones, like do you have multi-factor authentication for remote access? That is a typical risk control that a cyber insurer will price the risk differently, depending whether that control is in place or not. So I think there's some responsibility for the insurers to be able to not just provide a premium back, but say, this is a premium, but if you act on these 10 risk controls or you put these mitigating factors, you would get a different type of policy or a different type of premium.
Jillian Slyfield: Yeah. of what I was thinking as you were saying that is it's also helping carriers. And I think carriers are well on their way to this conversation. But companies are evolving so quickly right now. They are adapting. No matter what industry you're in, you're adapting to new technologies. I think their risk profile is changing faster than it was before. And so one of the things we talk to carriers about, and this is my language, not necessarily Aon's language, but the way I think about it is what's the difference between long data, which is data that we can look at over 10 years or 20 years. And we can say, OK, here's a pattern that we want to respond to, which is largely how underwriters historically underwritten. And I also think about deep data, which is we now have more data around every point of transaction we've ever had before. So are there underwriting insights that we can glean from the last six months as an example, but we have 100 data points instead of three data points over 10 years. Now, I don't think one is more valuable than the other. But I think in this era of change and complexity and, like I said, technological impact on our clients, you have to look at both. We can't take that. You just did cyber as an example. Do I actually think that a 10-year horizon on cyber risk for our clients or their claim profile over 10 years is valuable to a carrier? I mean, would 10 years ago, 2014, is that valuable for you to look at? Probably not. The company would have evolved so much since then. We've really got to put much more emphasis on what can we learn? What can we help our clients learn? How can we collaborate together to create a better risk profile? Today, over the next six months, over the next year, rather than what did it look like five years ago?
Juan de Castro: And just to give an example, what type of insights do you think Aon could manufacture for the clients?
Jillian Slyfield: So I guess we just started bringing them out at the end of last year and then now this year. So we've started a suite of what we call our analyzers. They will eventually all funnel up to one marketplace that clients will have access to, as well as us today and our colleagues. But today we have individual analyzers and their property analyzer, casualty analyzer, DNO, cyber, that's on the risk side of the business. We also have a health analyzer, but let's just talk about the analyzers for a minute. We take the loss information, exposure information, all the things that you would normally see at a renewal. And we model the risk to create kind of multiple loss forecasts for our clients. Then we look at it and we say, okay, what are the coverage options that might be coming to the table that we're seeing carriers come to? We put those into the system and then we can see where the overlap is so that clients have a better view of which option is going to create a better financial outcome for me, given the loss information that we have. So today, it's exactly as I said. The next version of that, which will be out in the next couple of months, we're constantly evolving these analyzers. It's taking the look back, but it's also using predictive analytics and artificial intelligence and AI modelling so that we can say, given all of this deep data, given what we know today, maybe we don't put as much emphasis on that 10-year-old cyber data. And we start to think about what is our client doing today and what are we actually predicting might happen, given what we know in the space over the next year. It gives our clients more information around. First of all, do I want to protect this risk? And if so, how do I want to protect the risk? And what does that structure look like?
Juan de Castro: Is part of the goal to help them evaluate and compare different policies or terms from different carriers? Is that part of the goal of those analyzers?
Jillian Slyfield: The goal is a couple of different things. So first of all, it's so that they understand their own risk. Because remember, they still have the same pool of data that we have. So they need to be able to interpret and understand this kind of data set that they have. So you can say, are we getting better? Are there areas for improvement? What does that look like? What's changing? So kind of step one is, let's understand my data set. Step two is, what is the response of the marketplace to that data set? And then given the information that we have today, what is the best financial match from a structure, premium, et cetera., for a carrier to that? So it goes so much further than what we used to do with actuarial modelling. It's that and more. The other piece that it does, and I think you brought this up, just hinted to it, which is carriers are interested in this too. So can we provide a better picture to carriers so that they have more information around, do they want to underwrite the risk? If so, what would that look like? What are the attachment points? How do they want to price it? If we can give them more confidence in their underwriting process, we believe that'll create a more efficient system or even bring more capacity to a place that may not have full capacity today.
Juan de Castro: And then going back, one of the points you made earlier was about the challenge of just the availability of the data. And you touched also earlier on the challenge that consolidation in the market brings. How big of a problem is that? So is the quality of the data actually hindering your ability to provide this type of insights faster?
Jillian Slyfield: So I would say at Aon, if you asked me this even three years ago, I would tell you that that was one of our most significant problems. And it's a challenge. It wasn't really a problem. It's just a challenge. It was, we're getting data, but what do we do with it? I mean, and remember, a lot of this data comes to us, at least today, it comes to us in an email. So submissions come in an email. Like there's a lot of transition through emails. I don't think that'll be true in a couple of years, by the way, but it is true today. And so how do we take that data, which might come in an Excel spreadsheet, it might come in a PDF. Put it into a format that we can utilise both for this client, but also that we can aggregate it in a way that we can create some of these insights and support it where we need to with synthetic data. So back to your question, if you were to ask me three years ago, I would have said, even if we had the best technology on the planet, we need to get the data organised. One of the commitments that we've made at Aon, and I know that carriers are doing this, other brokers are doing this too, is we have worked on older architecture for many, many years. And we made a commitment, it was part of our first quarter earnings call, that we were investing a billion dollars in both our infrastructure at Aon, as well as kind of evolving the way that we organise and manage our data. And then again, kind of next into tools. So all three of those things need to happen. So we're well on our way to that. But I would say there's still quite a bit of room for improvement. But we can now create, the analyzers that wouldn't have been possible, truly, two and a half, three years ago. Now they're possible with great data for our clients and will get even better as we continue to get better.
Juan de Castro: That is fantastic news. I mean, probably, as you said, three, five years ago, nobody would have believed that you could make progress and really use the data to provide value. And it probably sounds a bit harsh, but like five years ago, it was probably technically challenging to leverage all the data to provide better insights to clients. And it's fantastic to hear that you are getting there, very close to getting there.
Jillian Slyfield: Yeah. Well, technology has changed. There's character recognition technology and other technology where we can pull data, like I shared before, out of emails into other platforms where it can be utilised rather than having a person rekey it and things like that. So the technology available, not just ours, but just the technology available to us in the marketplace is so much further advanced that it's a good time for this.
Juan de Castro: So let's move onto the second area that you mentioned. You mentioned about future of mobility. So let's start with just an overview of, again, a huge topic. What are the main drivers of challenges in that space and how are you thinking about it?
Jillian Slyfield: So we started an area of investment around solutions for mobility clients because there's been so much advanced technology and change in this space. And social change. So I'll give you an example. And before I give the example, I'll say this. And that change gives us much more options as people who are using different types of mobility, whether it's autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, et cetera. But there's a lot of risk issues coming out of it as well that are not being addressed as well as we'd like them to. So when we think about mobility, if you were to go to any large fleet owner or fleet manager, you would hear that they have rising automotive costs, auto liability costs every year. It's uncontrolled and they don't know how to control it. And the information that they do get around kind of the status of where they're at, if they're very large and very aggressively managing it, they kind of know where they're at month by month. But I can almost guarantee you that at the end of the year when they have carriers that come in and talk to them about their renewal, they're getting huge increases, 20%, 40%, sometimes doubling. And they're thinking, oh my gosh, I don't know how to control this. And it's starting to drag my business. Instead of enabling my business. So out of control costs flip that. Why are carriers giving these huge increases? Well, they're giving huge increases because cost of the claims are going up. So more frequency, more severity, claims are out of control. And we're using vehicles differently than we did before. So all of a sudden you have this conflagration of different modalities, whether we talked about kind of autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, it could be scooters. You have different kinds of drivers. It used to always be human driver. I live in San Francisco. There are autonomous vehicles, no driver, no safety driver driving around. So that's new for us. And then of course you have the insurance piece, which is as my colleague who runs the future mobility team says, he's like, it's mandatory for cars everywhere in the world, except for New Hampshire and Egypt. So you have these three pieces that need to come together to be successful. And frankly, it's not working. As an industry, it's not working. So I went to a large entertainment client recently, global company. And I said, if we could solve one risk issue for you, what would it be? Like, if I could just grab one thing, you put it on my plate, I'll come back and fix it for you. What would it be? And they said, Fleet. It shocked me, actually because I think of them as entertainment. The reach is far, so many different risk issues. But the one that came up for them was Fleet. And again, it's because there's not enough information to enable the business. So we took it on.
Juan de Castro: I assume, for example, that obviously don't know who that client is, but entertainment client, I assume their fleet is probably not. It's still driven by humans with probably traditional vehicles. So why in those types of risks frequency and severity are going up?
Jillian Slyfield: People are driving faster than they used to drive before. So when it's a human-driven car, people are driving faster than they were before, meaning even five years ago, you will find that speed is increasing. That might surprise you. The one that won't surprise you is distracted driving is a major impetus. People are tired. People are on their phones. And that is not exclusive to you or me when we're driving in our car and running around and getting our groceries and things. That's in the workplace as well. And then there are new forms of vehicles, and it changes the liability picture. So if you think of rideshare, which if we go back 10 years or so, we would have thought of it as maybe more of a novelty. And now I think we all depend on it. You get out of an aeroplane at the airport, and what's the first thing we do? We get our rideshare, and off we go. You don't even think twice about it. But in that, there's a whole different liability picture around who's responsible for a loss and when. And then what is the impact of that on insurance? And so not just rideshare, but all these different forms create a different risk profile than we were ever used to covering before.
Juan de Castro: So I'm sure there's not a single solution. But if you had to think like, what are some of the potential solutions? Is it new insurance products? I mean, we've been talking about telematics for probably 15, 20 years, and it has not really picked up. But is it telematics? What is it?
Jillian Slyfield: So I think you're right. It's not going to be a one-size-fits-all. And even for a large fleet owner operator, I think there are things that they can do, but it's going to be multiple things that solve for it. One of the things that we've done at Aon from an innovation perspective is we bought a data and analytics company earlier this year. And so we've rebranded them as Fleet Risk Intelligence. And the goal of that, to your point about the telematics data, one of the challenges with telematics data is that it's a data set, but it's not insights. So, like, great. I know that Juan is a hard breaker. So he's hitting his brakes a lot. But, like, is that a problem? Or is it not a problem? What's happening? Well, if you live in New York and you're in Manhattan all the time, you're going to hit your brakes a lot. That's true. Now, if you're in Wyoming and you're hitting your brakes regularly, well, maybe that is a problem. So the telematics data in and of itself hasn't been put together in a way that's useful to our clients so that they can actually make either in the moment or weekly decisions about driver selection, driving behaviour, how can they enable their business better with a tool? And so one of the things that we did was acquire a company and it takes the telematics data. So whether that, if you already have a dongle or it can be from your phone, we pull telematics data from a phone, all connected cars, of course, have it. So it streams in and we create risk management insights from that data set. And so many of our auto clients have access to this if they're in the UK or US, and they can now see a picture of whether it's as specific as the way Jillian drives or the way Juan drives, or as general as, hey, all of your drivers who are driving after 9 p.m. Here's thematically what we're seeing, and here are some ways that you can help. So we do want to segment kind of the driver selection, but we also want to say in aggregate, here are some things you can do as an organisation to change the outcome of the drivers, the driver side of the client's profile.
Juan de Castro: Yeah, really what you're doing is going from behaviours that clients probably couldn't act on, things like you mentioned the average speed increasing, distracted driving. Obviously, for that entertainment company you were talking about, probably they were not aware of that. But with telematics and all the data, you're bringing that into insights, converting that into insight that you can play back to it. So it almost goes back to the first topic we discussed, like how do you play back those insights to the clients and say, hey, these are the factors that are driving that 20, 40% increase in your premium. This is what you can do about it, right?
Jillian Slyfield: Right. And I think what's interesting for this particular, so we talked about the analyzers earlier, and we will typically work with one of the analyzers in preparation for a renewal. With Fleet Risk Analytics, it's a business enablement tool that we give to clients that they can access constantly throughout the year. So they can access it daily. It becomes a dashboard for them. So the goal is you don't get to that renewal and have a surprise, or you don't get to that renewal and say, I have a surprise. Now here's the actions I'm going to take. It's month one, this is good. I want to make it even better. So I'm going to keep doing what I started doing. Or month two, it pivoted. Now I have specific actionable insights against my operations. And I'm in month two, I'm not in month 10, where the year is already set.
Juan de Castro - 00:31:20: And then how do you match that? Because obviously, as a broker, you can provide those insights to your point, those insights throughout the year to your clients to give visibility so that they're not surprised at the renewal time. But ultimately, the premium is going to be defined by the carrier. So do you actually need to work with the carrier to make sure that the insights and recommendations you're providing actually correlate or have an impact on the actual premium? Or how do you do that?
Jillian Slyfield: Absolutely. So two things with that. If everything goes according to plan, of course it always doesn't, but if it did, and it usually does when we have a client that's using fleet risk insights consistently, then the claims should to some degree speak for themselves, meaning the risk should be controlled and you should see that control reflected in results. Having said that, any one of my clients will tell you the same thing, which is the storytelling is incredibly important. There's a reason we don't just kind of package data up in a circle and throw it into a maths machine and it comes out and says, here's your premium, because our underwriters are looking for context and they're looking for us to say there is a culture of risk management. Here are the actions that I'm taking. This is how we're delivering results. They want to know that that great behaviour that they saw was a plan and not just like it might have happened once, can't happen again. And how are we going to continue to make this risk better and better? So, yes. So, number one, it's part of the storytelling. It's part of sitting down together, carrier, client, and broker at the beginning of the year and creating this plan and understanding fleet risk intelligence. It's having mid-year meetings and keeping everyone in this aligned on that same message. And absolutely end of the year, it's creating, there's actually deliverables that we can give to carriers so that they can see some of the actions that the client has been making as a result of using the tool. So, the goal is to make this something that's incremental over time. And at the end of the year, it's just like, oh, we know exactly what's going to happen. And frankly. Even if the result isn't exactly the what the client wants, and sometimes that's true, it's not a surprise. I think every client wants a great outcome, but if they're not going to get a great outcome, they want to know that as soon as humanly possible. And so giving some line of sight to what's happening is hugely impactful for our clients.
Juan de Castro: It makes absolute sense. I want to make sure we've got time for, you mentioned the third area or theme of innovation, which was about digitization and AI. Again, very broad topic. So how would you describe that third theme?
Jillian Slyfield: Yeah, this one is big. And part of what we've already been talking about, this all fits together. And I would say you have a background at Hiscox, so you know this too. Digital transformation and its fit with artificial intelligence is something that's coming up for a lot of carriers. I think all of the major brokers are starting to address it. At Aon, this is something where, as in most major innovations that we have, we're going to start small. We have started small. And then scale out from where we've begun. So kind of talk about what that looks like. And as always for us, this doesn't sit on my team. These are collaborations between our risk capital teams, our Aon business services, which is the kind of our operations and technology folks, and then our global region. So everybody's going to be in on this. But essentially, what we hear from brokers, carriers, and clients. In the broking process, everything from submission all the way to claims, like that entire journey, everyone's asking for the same thing. And when I say everyone, I mean the carriers, our clients, and our brokers are asking for simplification. It's complicated. We're constantly filling out different forms. One's an Excel spreadsheet. Another might be a paper form. I actually learned one of our offices has a fax machine because they receive old-fashioned fax. I didn't even know anybody had those anymore. But we've got some of these antiquated processes for gathering information. So simplification, more clarity around what's needed and why, what are the outcomes. For the data that we get and then return insights to our clients, as well as what our carriers are asking for, they're asking for more confidence in it. If you're telling me this is a great outcome, how did you get there? What does this mean? There's a lot of questions about that. And so one of the things that we're building is a digital marketplace so that there's a kind of four horizons, if you will. But in the final horizon, there will be a digital marketplace, part of which creates kind of an alternative to traditional wholesale arrangements. But one in which we can conduct business in some cases almost instantly, meaning in less than a couple of minutes in its ultimate form to take away from some of the processes that we have today that are just administrative and labour intensive rather than true knowledge work where we want to spend our time. So we want our colleagues and our clients in return focusing on things where it's relationship oriented, knowledge work oriented, back to the inside, not into the data collection and processing. Let's get that as clean as we can. And it isn't like that today. It's the beginning, but it's the beginning of a birth.
Juan de Castro: I would love to hear about the first three horizons together. So that concept of a marketplace without getting too technical, is that like a API integrated marketplace between Aon and insurers where you seamlessly exchange data with carriers, can send the risk information, can get quotes back, bind, et cetera?
Jillian Slyfield: Perfect. That's exactly it. But I think all of that is absolutely correct. And I would say it's an and, which is the impact on our client. So what you described is the piece that Aon manages and the relationship between ourselves and our carriers. But it's pretty clunky. And it's not just Aon. This is, I guess, an industry. I think we have not yet mastered kind of data collection from our clients. What does that look like? You and I were kind of joking about emails earlier in the number of them that we get on any one day, but we send things out via email to clients. They fill out forms in different formats. They send it back by email. We take it, we rekey it into different systems. There's a friction in that. And candidly, probably time that could be better spent for our clients as well. Certainly there's an accuracy issue if you've got people rekeying data, both on client side and on the broking side of the business, that we think we can clean up and create a better, frankly, it'll make our broker's lives a lot better. So it'll be a better colleague experience, but most importantly, it's a better value proposition for our clients. They don't need that too. So I It's exactly what you described, but I think it's a better flow of information through the entire collaborative team.
Juan de Castro: I cannot agree more with the vision. And one question on that, because typically the biggest challenge in deploying a marketplace is that you somehow need critical mass on both sides. So unless, ideally, all carriers are able to integrate with you that way through the marketplace, but that's probably going to take years. But also the other way around, probably carriers also don't want to have to connect with 75 broker marketplaces. So have you given any thoughts on that? Is this like the Aon marketplace, or are you thinking about creating more like a market-wide marketplace where there are other brokers and insurers?
Jillian Slyfield: I think that either one is possible. And I don't know that I have the answer to that yet. That is definitely kind of the fourth of the four horizons. I love the idea of an efficient marketplace that you just described. We're so far away from that right now. And I don't say that in a negative way, but what I mean is I think there are very meaningful, tangible steps we can take today that drive us much closer to the marketplace. And we'll get there. This isn't, here's where we're gonna do in 20 years. This is, here's where we're gonna be in three, four years. But what I suspect will happen is that that answer will come to us as the other steps evolve. And what I mean by that is what we think is gonna happen now and where we're driving toward that vision will probably change, probably evolve. And you talked about having kind of some economies of scale, right? You've gotta have some scale to get started. So some of the areas just to make it very simple in our first horizon is just around digitising facilities that we already have. So let's just make our lives easier when it comes. Aon's got a tool, a facility called Aon Client Treaty. Another one is our global property facility. We can digitise that. Like this isn't even algorithms, AI. Let's all set that aside for a minute. That's great to think about, but we need to digitise these facilities that have historically been fairly analogue. And again, that creates a faster turnaround time for our clients, better quoting ability on our part, and much easier for our brokers. It saves them time, saves them hassle. But just digitising that is step one. And we've already done, so for the global property facility, that's already done and operationalized and up and running. So in those first horizons, we can see some of the magic that's already happening for our clients and our colleagues.
Juan de Castro: And very briefly, before we wrap up, what are the horizons two and three? Are they defined already?
Jillian Slyfield: So I know you're familiar, many have this kind of open market fast follow. So there are platforms providing that today. That's our second horizon is getting that institutionalised and up and running. Then we have a similar idea, but lead open market. So that'll be kind of third horizon. And fourth horizon goes to where you started and kind of what we talked about as a vision, which is kind of the full marketplace.
Juan de Castro: Jillian, I have absolutely loved this conversation. I think it's been a fantastic balance between being really inspirational, very client-focused, but at the same time with a lot of clarity around what are the incremental steps to get there. So thank you so much for joining me today. I've really enjoyed the discussion.
Jillian Slyfield: Thank you. I have too. It's been a pleasure.
