Insurance is a vast and complex sector, and helping clients navigate the market is a key part of Aon’s insurance vertical.
Emma Crookes, Aon’s UK Insurance Vertical Leader and Global Account Manager, is responsible for coordinating Aon’s teams in this space to deliver the best client outcomes.
Crookes began her career at Aon over 11 years ago, working in the group’s reinsurance business, and was, until two years ago, heavily involved in the broking side of the business.
This experience gave her a strong understanding of what companies are looking for and the solutions they seek to achieve their objectives.
Aon has a global footprint with more than 400 clients in multiple countries and across 15+ lines of business, and it can draw on this expansive footprint when tailoring solutions to clients in the Insurance Vertical across companies and sectors.
“The past couple of years, we have been working towards a much more client-end-centric model when it comes to our insurance company and reinsurance company clients,” Crookes told City A.M.
Insurance vertical
There are five different solution lines at Aon: reinsurance, insurance, health, wealth and talent.
“The insurance vertical is all about bringing together the broader Aon proposition for our insurance clients, as opposed to offering them only financial services solutions,” Crookes said.
This could include looking at products related to health and benefits “that we can adapt and develop to align with their unique needs.”
Aon tailors its solutions to clients based on experience across its verticals. Crookes, who was a broker until two years ago, noted, “Through the vertical, you get to learn so much about Aon’s holistic offering, as well as what our insurance clients care about outside of reinsurance.”
For the group, it’s all about offering multiple solutions for clients. Aon has become a one-stop shop for the insurance sector.
“Let’s say someone approached us with a view to creating a syndicate at Lloyd’s,” Aon’s UK Insurance Vertical Leader said, “There are so many capabilities that are needed to make that a reality.”
“We can support across the whole Lloyd’s ecosystem when it comes to a new syndicate launch, within our Capital Advisory team in reinsurance. However, you’ll also be thinking, ‘Okay, I’m going to hire 50 people in year one, and then 100 people in year two’. But what is the talent strategy? The pure basics of, do I have a way to monitor performance? Do I have a way to pay people? Do I have a management structure in mind? Can I offer health benefits? What are we going to do about employing people, and their pensions and their healthcare? Do we set up a trust?” she added.
Bringing it all together
Aon can use a strategic, holistic approach to bring it all together.
One of the biggest challenges for both the insurance sector and the wider economy today is the risk of cyber attacks. Cyber is one of the fastest-growing areas of the market. The global cyber insurance market has reached a size of $14bn in 2023 and is estimated by Munich Re to increase to around $29bn by 2027.
For Aon, “cyber, and how we handle it with clients, is multi-faceted,” said Crookes.
“We have a developed an integrated insurance product for insurance companies, and what’s new is that it integrates cyber insurance with more ‘traditional’ cover such as PI and crime,” she noted.
“The traditional approach has been to have separate covers and then staple them together which makes it harder to understand what is and isn’t covered and also leads to the risk of gaps in cover,” Crookes added.
Instead, Aon has developed a product called FI Protect 360 specifically to “address the risks that our insurer clients face with AI and cyber…It’s not just how you get rid of that risk. It’s knowing what that risk is.”
Cyber reinsurance presents a different risk picture for the group. “You’re writing lots of those different cyber insurances, and any of those could employ new AI or new technology, which can be both positive and negative from a risk perspective,” Crookes explained.
“How does that then affect if something goes wrong with that technology that could affect 20 or 100 of your clients in one book? That’s where our reinsurance colleagues come in. And again, that’s all around analysing their risk, applying that to their portfolios, and then working out how much they need to reinsure themselves for what their clients might also be doing.”
Ultimately, Aon’s vertices are designed to pull the groups experience together to help clients achieve the best outcome. Crookes explained how it’s all pulled together, “You’re an Aon client, and you come to us and you say ‘I’m thinking of using this technology. What do you think? We can apply that to all of those areas. And they may not currently work with us in one or two of those three, but we can still advise on how that might look.”