Owen Williams is the Insurance CIO for Everest Re Group, Ltd. with responsibility for a broad portfolio of IT strategy, applications, and operations. He previously served as SVP/CIO at Hamilton USA, VP/CTO at Tokio Marine North American Services, and SVP/CIO for Claims at Chubb. Owen holds an MBA from University of Connecticut and a BS from Teikyo Post University, as well as a Chartered Insurance Operations Professional designation from the American Management Association. He is a regular guest speaker at technology conferences and has written numerous technical publications. Owen was interviewed for the Novarica Update in 2018.
What are your key priorities for the next 6-12 months?
The first thing is focusing on building out our core platforms for specialty lines, primarily policy administration and underwriting workstation. This will allow us to gain a new level of operating efficiency, as well as support greater use of predictive modeling and analytics.
We are also continuing our digital journey, building out and improving our portals, and deploying more APIs to support our value chain.
At the same time, we are continuing to optimize additional parts of our operations using RPA and AI-driven document ingestion processes.
Finally, we are partnering with selected InsureTechs to find partners that can bring new capabilities to bear in our core processes, especially distinctive data to support underwriting or innovative uses of AI and natural language processing to support optimizing document-heavy processes.
How are you structuring your innovation efforts and engagement with InsureTechs?
We have an executive team that drives that area who partners with IT. We monitor the space by consuming research and participating in events including those run by some of the major incubators like Plug and Play. We look for potential partners for proof-of-concept initiatives, then focus on implementations that create tactical value.
You mentioned APIs. How advanced are you in microservices?
We are pretty far along at this point, we have a fair amount of services that we’re leveraging. We build for internal usage first and then push some of the same services out for external use. Some of the types of things we’re using microservices for include submission, account clearance processes, quoting processes, booking, endorsements for some lines, plus some basic document ingestion and routing. We’ve also created some APIs for our program administrators.
How has the role of IT evolved recently?
IT teams are part of strategic conversation with business partners. Our business leaders are doing more than just paying lip service to the idea of technology as a differentiator. They really see the value in digital platforms to improve their businesses, and they are working closely with IT to build those out. We’ve improved our delivery capabilities, which increases the confidence of the organization in IT and drives additional investment.
How have you and your team leveraged your Novarica relationship?
Reading the research and engaging with the advisory team is always helpful to get a broader perspective of the insurance industry and its trends. The insurance-specific expertise is valuable, that is something I don’t get from my other research sources. We also use some of the frameworks like the core systems map and the 3N100 capabilities descriptions in our internal planning activities.
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