Having Skin in the Game – William Spiegel, Executive Chairman, Randall & Quilter

In this week’s episode of The Voice of Insurance podcast, Mark Geoghegan chats with William Spiegel, Executive Chairman of Randall & Quilter Investment Holdings Ltd, which provides core services of legacy acquisitions and program management.

During the chat, William brings to life two interesting and uncorrelated high-growth profitable business opportunities that perhaps don’t get as much air time as they should. William kicks off the discussion by speaking about his background growing up in Canada, dreaming about being a professional hockey player to working in financial services, and why embracing data in his organisation is a must and how it plays a fundamental role in making better business decisions.

Speaking about the insurance ecosystem and running a successful business, William comments, “I say, it’s important to keep your business model simple, and I think it’s important to articulate it and execute on it and not have constant strategy changes; so we´re not looking into getting into any other business lines.”

Embracing data

As the conversation turns to technology and data, William speaks about the importance of using data to write better business, “An insurance company needs to be a data company to understand its customers and get the best results.”

Elaborating further on data usage at Randall & Quilter, William says: “We want to analyse the data. However, we get it in one form and then yes, pass observations back to our MGAs to help them improve their business, that would make them even stickier, obviously, because we can help them, and it will make us hopefully help the reinsurers understand the business that they are getting and how profitable it should be for them.”

Mark asks for William´s view on how the insurtech world has interacted with legacy; William comments: “In five years we´re not going to be talking about insurtech, because if you haven´t embraced technology, you won´t be in business, maybe it´s ten years, so insurtech is just going to be insurance.”

Commenting further on the benefits of settling a claim through technology, Williams says: “The way I want to approach this whole insurtech is – how can we make ourselves a data company to fatten our margins going forward and grow and effectively make better business decisions and grow and enhance our margins?”

Data is, without a doubt, one of the current buzzwords in the insurance industry. We wanted to understand how the industry uses data to make risk decisions and write better risk, especially during the last 18 months with the pandemic and the increasing severity of natural catastrophes. We ran a survey based on interviews with 200 underwriting decision-makers from B2B insurance companies in the US and UK. The key findings available in The Science of Risk Report revealed that:

• Only 16%of Insurance organisations have access to all of the latest up-to-date external data sources needed to make scientific decisions on risk
• 87%admitted their organisations could be more scientific in their approach to underwriting decision making
• 81%have had to make pre-bind decisions that are not based on all the data necessary to be profitable
• 72%think they will need to evolve their use of technology in order to compete effectively post COVID-19

Can the insurance industry rise to the data challenge and get more scientific on risk? Risk is at the core of insurance. But is the industry moving fast enough in its ability to exploit data to serve customers better and support underwriters? Time will tell.

Enjoy the podcast.