Justin Elks, managing director and UK enterprise risk management and insurance lead at Crowe, explains how the risk consultancy is helping insurers to prepare for digital transformation, assess their operational resilience and embrace change

How have Crowe's services to insurers improved over the past year?

The insurance industry is facing an unprecedented period of change, and is harnessing innovation and technology to transform businesses, meet the needs of its customers and address the requirements of wider stakeholders.

We offer bespoke services, so our offering and services continuously evolve and adapt to support our clients navigate these developments. Clients typically come to us for help and support in four key areas:

1.  Mastering data – helping them use governance, technology and analytics to effectively manage and get value from their data assets;
2.  Delivering transformation – including embedding change in their culture and business structures;
3. Building resilience – helping them to withstand, absorb and respond to uncertainty; and 4. Enhancing strategy – helping them to use effective and efficient risk management and governance to enhance decision making.

How does Crowe plan to innovate its range of services?

We'll keep listening to insurers to understand their concerns and requirements, and will combine our deep knowledge of the insurance industry with our strong capabilities – in risk and governance, technology and analytics, actuarial and business, and culture and change – to deliver value. Our desire to be innovative comes from a desire to work as genuine business partners delivering practical solutions, working shoulder to shoulder with our clients.

What makes Crowe's services stand out compared with other insurance consultancies?

We are specialist risk and governance consultants concentrated on doing a select number of things extremely well and the majority of our work is within the insurance industry. Our consultants have typically worked as practitioners, as well as consultants and regulators, and so are well placed to deliver tailored, relevant and practical solutions that align with a client's strategic objectives.

What were major priorities for Crowe's insurance clients in 2019 and is this likely to change?

In 2019, we saw an increasing focus on making risk and governance work more efficiently and effectively, more emphasis on using data and analytics to drive business value and organisations starting to grapple with operational resilience. So far in 2020, we are seeing data and analytics take centre stage. Data is an enormously valuable asset, but extracting its value effectively is a difficult undertaking and requires a well-mapped journey from the outset.

More companies are embedding AI and machine learning into their organisation, but have yet to fully understand the impact it's having. As AI and machine learning become more mainstream, it will be essential to update risk management frameworks that reflect specific factors in this new environment to preserve customer trust, manage business performance, help ensure business continuity and to deliver regulatory compliance.

We are also helping companies understand the effectiveness of their operational resilience approach to reflect recent changes to regulatory expectations, and consider those capabilities as part of more established operational risk and enterprise risk management methodologies. This will evolve over the year and we'll see the development of practical approaches to the regulatory requirements and, I suspect, a particular focus on enhancing the management of third-party risk.

How is Crowe helping insurers digitally transform, while also addressing cyber risk?

In today's interconnected, technology-enabled business world, firms need to balance the use of technology and data to transform their businesses, and deliver strategic outcomes against their need to effectively manage risk and build resilience against increasingly complex information security threats.

Cyber risk is continually changing and we are helping firms adapt to the changing nature of this risk and associated emerging threats, which come not only from external agents, but increasingly from company insiders and third parties.

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