2023 US Insurance Awards: Willis Towers Watson, Broker Team of the Year

When a major entertainment services company issued a request for proposal for its global casualty program in 2022, Willis Towers Watson PLC responded with months of consultation, before and after the award of the business. 

“This was the best-run RFP of my 30-year career,” said George Haitsch, technology, media and telecommunications industry leader and managing director in Philadelphia for WTW, describing a “marquee new client” for the broker. 

“Brokers prefer to be in contact with a prospective client prior to the RFP,” and the engagement period for the client covered about six months, both before and after the RFP was submitted, he  said. 

The client had recently put in place a new risk management team which “made themselves accessible and available” for multiple demonstrations and presentations, going through about a half-dozen demos of the broker’s analytical tools, Mr. Haitsch said. 

The company chose to renew its casualty lines alone and and “spent hours as a team getting to know their broker partners,” Mr. Haitsch said. 

The program included areas such as workers compensation, where coverage was restructured to yield several hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings while raising the retention level. 

For general liability and auto liability, the broker was able to add twenty coverage enhancements, including limited pollution coverage. In addition, the company was able to reduce its total cost of risk, he said. 

Modeling different outcomes was a key part of the process, using tools including WTW’s limits adequacy model in evaluating the umbrella and excess liability program, where ultimately the client took on $20 million in additional coverage, Mr. Haitsch said. 

At the time the program was placed in mid-2022, “market conditions were stabilizing for primary casualty,” while the excess and surplus lines market was “still more challenging and fluid,” he said. The harder market was “definitely a factor which created more work for brokers,” he said.

As a former risk manager himself — for 10 years at German software giant SAP SE prior to joining WTW 13 years ago — Mr. Haitsch said he can appreciate both sides of the renewal process.

When he worked as risk manager, he said he viewed himself “as marketing SAP to potential strategic partners who were going to underwrite and take on risks material to me.” 

FINALISTS

• Conner Strong & Buckelew — The broker’s employee benefits captive team used innovative techniques to lower overall health care costs for organizations across the United States.

• Hylant Group Inc. — The broker’s team helped build an occurrence-based program in a tough market environment that secured the necessary limits at significant savings.

• Marsh McLennan Agency — The Marsh LLC unit’s national accounts team, which was formed in 2018 to service upper middle-market companies, has grown significantly while retaining nearly all its clients during the hard market. 

• Newfront Insurance — The broker’s team used captives to mitigate increased costs affecting the real estate sector and built relationships with underwriters to offer options to clients that were not otherwise available.