Before he joined Proteus in April 2021, the firm’s chief growth officer, Tony Russell (pictured), had never really considered working for a consultancy before. In his two decades spent serving the insurance industry, he had held a variety of roles, first supporting broking businesses then later managing agencies - before he joined Charles Taylor Insuretech which he helped evolve into a 600-person, £50 million business with operations in the UK and Latam.
Looking back, he noted, however, that the impulse that beset him when he first walked up Fenchurch Street in 2002 has never gone away. Twenty years later, he still feels the same need that he did back then to help insurance providers, to guide them through market changes and to alter the way they think about doing business. It is an impulse that lends itself naturally to becoming part of a consultancy firm, or at least the right consultancy firm.
“I’d never really considered consultancies because I always found, certainly from a vendor’s perspective, that all they ever did was talk to the client and push the bar even higher for the vendors,” he said. “Then they disappeared and didn’t have anything to do with the actual implementation. So, I’d always steered away because I felt that wasn’t value for money and then I met Proteus… And I’ve found a golden nugget as it’s an organisation that has spent the last 23 years developing solutions to change and transformation.”
What Proteus has done is use data and codified the experiences they have gained through the many 1,000s of global projects they have carried out. In doing so, he said, they’ve proved the correlation between good practice, and being able to predict, judge and visually represent the current status of change programmes (particularly when a company is running multiple change programmes).
Russell compared this to the mass amounts of data involved with any Formula One race. Every car in every race delivers 400 gigabytes worth of data, he said, and that’s all being utilised to shave a 10th or a 100th of a second off a lap. This data is used for predictive analytics to judge the expected outcome of the race, or any decision made during that race. That’s what Proteus does within its change and transformation programmes – it uses data to set a benchmark and allow people to have informed discussions about the status of a programme, and to make informed decisions about any tweaks that need to be made for its success.
“I’ve found an environment where there are some pretty heavyweight consultants,” he said. “And I suddenly realised that if I’d had this technology and tooling when I was working in the Lloyd’s market, the world would have been a much better place. Because one of the biggest challenges the insurance industry has got is management and stakeholder complexity. There are so many people all trying to do the same thing, but they’re all doing it in a different a slightly different way. There’s no consistent data set.
“Analytics is being based on the organisation’s requirements rather than the market’s requirements. I truly believe the Lloyd’s market is under threat unless they start getting together in a more joined-up way… I’m starting to venture back into the market now because I absolutely 100% believe I can help [the market] undertake some of the transformation that they need to do to keep relevant, particularly with the mergers and acquisitions we’re seeing. But also, the supply chain is too long, there are too many touchpoints on a risk coming from wherever it is in the world. And therefore, the value of those risks is reducing all the time.”
As a problem-solver by nature, Russell is well used to taking the temperature of how ready the market is to embrace change and transformation and he emphasised that it inevitably will take some time for companies to change horses since things have been done the same way for so long. In his conversations with major insurance businesses, while he points to how the right technology can help mitigate the challenges they face, he is careful to note it is only part of the solution. Businesses need to look at their operating models, he said, as well as how they capture and use their data, and they need to make the whole supply chain a bit slicker.
There’s no golden button solution to this, Russell noted, and he would not claim for a second to have that solution. But in the decades he has spent within the industry he has seen that there is a strong correlation between implementing a project successfully and getting the right structures in place early on.
Programmes are divided into four phases – the direction, the design, the delivery and D-Day. Within each of those segments, there are up to 24 attributes against which success can be measured. In lots of situations, there are often trade-offs in the market that are based on human opinion. What Proteus is able to do is to instigate these based on the key factors that are actually underscoring the success of any given project.
“I do think that when you involve human beings in any kind of process, it’s [usually] the weakest link,” he said. “Software tends not to fail, it’s the people that are implementing that go wrong… [What we do] takes the human element out of it. People are less likely to keep quiet about the fact something’s going wrong if they can evidence a practical way of getting it sorted out before the event.
“[…] I think taking out that human element and finger-pointing is a really important part of what we’re trying to do. And so, I’ve got meetings set up now with some of the key players in the London market because I genuinely believe I’ve got to try and articulate why it’s time to do something slightly different. Because, at the moment, a lot of organisations keep doing the same thing and guess what? They keep getting the same outcome.”
