Simon Weaver has been appointed Australian head of Willis Towers Watson three years after the merger between insurance company Willis Group and employee benefits and asset consultant Towers Watson, but he says there is “more to be done” to take advantage of the 2016 move.
Weaver assumed the top job in Australia, after Andrew Boal, a veteran of the superannuation industry, decided to leave the firm after 27 years of service.
Weaver said there was “still significant opportunity” for the two sides of Willis Towers Watson’s business to cross-sell – this despite Australia’s unusual employee benefits market making a merger of the two global firms a less obvious fit in Australia than in other markets, The Australian Financial Review reported.
In markets such as the US and Britain where pensions and other employee benefits such as group life insurance are provided by large employers as a matter of course, the merger had clear benefits as the situation allows the two large employers to cross-sell to each other. But in Australia, the benefits aren’t as obvious due to the country’s compulsory superannuation system.
"There is a big opportunity for us to take more market share on the broking side of the business," Weaver told AFR. "We've got a fabulous global set of analytical risk tools, which can help us analyse the different insurable exposures that businesses have, and I want to deploy those quite aggressively."
Although a number of Australian companies set up their own super funds, such as in the case of Telstra and Rio Tinto corporate funds, most companies pay for their employees’ superannuation into independent super funds, generally not-for-profit. These funds also provide group life insurance, making the company-specific employee-benefits market in Australia comparatively small, AFR said.
As a result, most of Tower Watson’s clients are super funds, while large and medium-sized corporates make up Willis’s insurance clients.
Weaver said there are "still significant scopes" to cross-sell — and this was not limited to designing insurance packages for super-fund clients.
"Let's say you're a bank, and you decide to acquire another bank. You're going to have a number of issues," Weaver told the publication. "One is risk. But also you might have employees on different benefit schemes, so how do you blend those benefits schemes, which is something you have to do? And there might be different executive-compensation schemes, and different pension schemes. So, there are a whole range of issues, and it's very hard to find one company that can advise you on all those separate issues. But we can now do that. We can be a one-stop shop for all that."
Weaver said another area where both sides of the business could complement each other is Towers Watson’s employee-survey business, which allowed employers insights about their workforces.
“Take cyber for example. We know from our research on our consulting side that one of the key drivers for cyber loss is activities and behaviour of the workforce, so if you've got a disenfranchised workforce you've got a much higher risk of a cyber breach," Weaver told AFR. "So, we think we've got a great opportunity to overlap both the traditional insurance side to what's happening with people.”
Alex Dunnin, director of research at Rainmaker, said although super funds still employ the services of consultants such as WTW, there was little growth opportunity in the area as super funds grew and increasingly develop in-house expertise.
"If you're a bright young person, and you look at where the career opportunities are, it wouldn't be with a consultant. It would be with one of the big super funds,” Dunnin told AFR. “They [consultants] can't just sit around consulting for not-for-profit industry funds anymore."
