Willis Towers Watson Public Limited Company (‘WTW’) operates as a global advisory, broking and solutions company that provides data-driven, insight-led solutions in the areas of people, risk and capital.
Utilizing the global view and local expertise of the company’s approximately 49,000 colleagues serving more than 140 countries and markets, the company helps organizations sharpen strategies, enhance resilience, motivate workforces, and maximize performance. The company designs and delivers sol...
Willis Towers Watson Public Limited Company (‘WTW’) operates as a global advisory, broking and solutions company that provides data-driven, insight-led solutions in the areas of people, risk and capital.
Utilizing the global view and local expertise of the company’s approximately 49,000 colleagues serving more than 140 countries and markets, the company helps organizations sharpen strategies, enhance resilience, motivate workforces, and maximize performance. The company designs and delivers solutions that manage risk, optimize benefits, cultivate talent, and expand the power of capital to protect and strengthen institutions and individuals.
The company’s clients operate on a global and local scale in a multitude of businesses and industries throughout the world and generally range in size from large, major multinational corporations to middle-market domestic and international companies. The company’s clients include many corporations, including approximately 96% of the FTSE 100, 89% of the Fortune 1000, and 90% of the Fortune Global 500 companies. The company also advises the majority of insurance companies. It works with major corporations, emerging growth companies, governmental agencies, and not-for-profit institutions in a wide variety of industries, with many of its client relationships spanning decades. The company places insurance with approximately 2,500 insurance carriers.
WTW offers its clients a broad range of services and solutions to help them identify and control their risks, and to enhance business performance by improving their ability to attract, retain, and engage a talented workforce. The company’s risk control services range from strategic risk consulting (including providing actuarial analysis) to a variety of due diligence services, to the provision of practical on-site risk control services (such as health and safety or property loss control consulting), as well as analytical and advisory services (such as hazard modeling and climate risk quantification). The company assists clients in planning how to manage incidents or crises when they occur. These services include contingency planning, security audits, and product tampering plans. The company helps its clients enhance their business performance by delivering consulting services, technology, and solutions that help them anticipate, identify, and capitalize on emerging opportunities in human capital management, as well as offer investment advice to help them develop disciplined and efficient strategies to meet their investment goals.
As an insurance broker, the company acts as an intermediary between its clients and insurance carriers by advising its clients on their risk management requirements, helping them determine the best means of managing risk, and negotiating and placing insurance with insurance carriers through its global distribution network.
The company operates a private Medicare marketplace in the U.S. through which, along with its active employee marketplace, it helps its clients move to a more sustainable economic model by capping and controlling the costs associated with healthcare benefits.
The company derives the majority of its revenue from either commissions or fees for brokerage or consulting services. It has some businesses, such as its health and benefits and administration businesses, which can be counter-cyclical during the early period of a significant economic change.
Business Strategy
The company operates in attractive markets – both growing and mature – with a diversified platform across industries, segments, and businesses globally. The key elements of the company’s strategy are to accelerate performance and optimize its portfolio.
Principal Services
The company manages its business across two integrated reportable operating segments: Health, Wealth & Career and Risk & Broking.
Health, Wealth & Career
The Health, Wealth & Career (‘HWC’) segment provides an array of advice, broking, solutions, and technology for employee benefit plans, institutional investors, compensation and career programs, and the employee experience overall. The company’s portfolio of services supports the interrelated challenges that the management teams of its clients face across human resources (‘HR’) and finance.
HWC is the larger of the two segments of the company. Addressing four key areas, Health, Wealth, Career, and Benefits Delivery & Outsourcing, the segment is focused on addressing its clients’ people and risk needs to help them succeed in a global marketplace.
Health
The Health & Benefits (‘H&B’) business provides strategy and design consulting, plan management service and support, broking, and administration across the full spectrum of health, wellbeing, and other group benefit programs, including medical, dental, disability, life, voluntary benefits, and other coverage. The company’s reach extends from small/mid-market clients to large-market and multinational clients, across the full geographic footprint of the company, and to most industries.
The company’s consultants help clients make strategic decisions on topics, such as optimizing program spend, evaluating emerging vendors, point solutions, and coverage options (including publicly-subsidized health insurance exchanges and private exchanges in the U.S.), and dealing with above-inflation-rate increases in healthcare costs. The company also assists clients in selecting the appropriate insurance carriers to cover benefit risks and administer the programs. In addition to its consulting and broking services, the company manages a number of collective purchasing initiatives, such as pharmacy and stop-loss, that allow employers to realize greater value from third-party service providers than they can achieve on their own.
With Global Benefits Management, the company’s suite of global services supporting medical, dental, and risk (e.g., life, disability) programs, it has a tailored offering for multinationals. This offering includes a flexible set of ready-made solutions, proven technology, and an integrated approach to service delivery that translates to a globally consistent experience for its clients.
Given the balance of revenue across consulting, broking, and solutions, the company’s revenue is somewhat weighted to the first half of the year.
Wealth
The company’s wealth-related businesses include Retirement and Investments.
Retirement — The company’s Retirement business provides actuarial support, plan design, and administrative services for all forms of pension and retirement savings plans. The company’s colleagues help its clients assess the costs and risks of retirement plans on cash flow, earnings, and the balance sheet, the effects of changing workforce demographics on their retirement plans, and retiree benefit adequacy and security. The company offers clients a full range of integrated retirement consulting services and solutions to meet the needs of all types of employers. The company helps multinationals coordinate plan design and actuarial services across their complex global plans. The company brings in-depth data analysis and perspective to their decision-making process as it has tracked the retirement designs and financing strategies of companies around the world over many decades.
For clients that want to outsource some or all of their pension plan management, the company offers broking services, as well as integrated solutions that can combine investment discretionary management, pension administration, core actuarial services, and communication and change management assistance.
Retirement relationships are generally long-term in nature, and client retention rates for this business are high. A significant portion of the revenue in this business is from recurring work, with multi-year contracts that are driven by the heavily regulated nature of pension plans and its clients’ annual needs for these services.
Investments — The company’s Investments business provides advice and discretionary investment management solutions to defined benefit and defined contribution pension plans, as well as to a range of other client types including insurers, endowments and foundations, and private wealth investors. The company provides a solution to a significant business problem faced by its clients, namely sustaining the resources and skills required to deliver a financial services product in highly competitive capital markets. The company offers a flexible approach that adapts to a wide range of client needs and circumstances, with the objective of higher returns, lower risk, and lower costs within each client’s unique situation.
The company’s solutions range from single asset class activity through complete management of entire pension plan assets, including sophisticated liability hedging programs, as well as pooled employer plans/Master Trust under its LifeSight branding.
The company brings together a broad array of specialist investment knowledge and skills across all asset classes, a high-quality execution platform, a cost advantage through its scale, and expert advisors with experience across all client types from the largest plans in the world to small corporate pension plans.
The company has long-term relationships with its investments clients, with the majority of its revenue driven by retainer contracts.
Career
The company’s career-related offerings include advice, data, software, and products to address clients’ total rewards and talent issues across the globe delivered through its Work & Rewards and Employee Experience businesses.
Work & Rewards — Within the company’s Work & Rewards business, it helps clients determine the best ways to get work done, the skills needed for jobs, and how to reward employees. The company addresses executive compensation and broad-based rewards. The company advises its clients’ management and boards of directors on all aspects of executive pay programs, including base pay, annual bonuses, long-term incentives, perquisites, and other benefits. The company’s focus is on aligning pay plans with an organization’s business strategy and driving desired performance. The company’s solutions incorporate proprietary market benchmarking data and software to support compensation administration.
Employee Experience — The company’s Employee Experience business focuses on the provision of solutions including employee insight and listening tools, a technology platform that serves as a gateway for employees and plan participants to access their benefits and career information, communication, and change management services.
Revenue for the company’s career-related businesses is partly seasonal in nature, with heightened activity in the second half of the calendar year during the annual compensation, benefits, and survey cycles. While these businesses enjoy long-term relationships with many clients, work in some parts of the businesses is project-based and can be sensitive to economic changes. The businesses benefit from regulatory changes affecting its clients that require strategic advice, program changes, and communication, the redefinition of jobs, work location, and career paths as technology disaggregates work, and the recalibration of pay and the employee experience amidst shifting labor markets.
Benefits Delivery & Outsourcing
The company’s Benefits Delivery & Outsourcing businesses include Benefits Delivery & Administration (‘BDA’) and Global Outsourcing.
Benefits Delivery & Administration — The BDA business includes Individual Marketplace and Benefits Accounts.
Individual Marketplace — Individual Marketplace offers decision support processes and tools to connect consumers with insurance carriers in private individual and Medicare markets. Individual Marketplace serves employer-based populations through its end-to-end consumer acquisition and engagement platforms, which tightly integrate call routing technology, an efficient quoting and enrollment engine, a customer relations management system, and deep links with insurance carriers. By leveraging its multiple distribution channels and diverse product portfolio, Individual Marketplace offers solutions to a broad consumer base, helping individuals compare, purchase, and use health insurance products, tools, and information for life.
Benefits Accounts — Benefits Accounts provides employees and retirees with tax-advantaged medical spending and savings accounts, including health savings accounts (‘HSA’), health care flexible spending accounts (‘HCFSA’), dependent care flexible spending accounts (‘DCFSA’), limited purpose flexible spending accounts (‘LPFSA’), and health reimbursement arrangements (‘HRA’). Benefits Accounts is an important component of the company’s holistic solutions suite, allowing employers to choose among an array of funding accounts when offering employees and retirees account-based health plans.
Global Outsourcing — Global Outsourcing administers the health, welfare, and retirement plans of clients using the company’s proprietary technology, including tools to enable benefit modeling, decision support, enrollment and benefit choice, records management, and self-service functions. The company’s technology also provides trustees and HR teams with timely management information to monitor activity and service levels and reduce administration costs.
With ongoing servicing requirements and multi-year contracts in place, the company has high client retention rates. The company provides plan administration services in North America, the U.K., Ireland, and Germany.
A significant portion of the revenue in Benefits Delivery & Outsourcing is recurring in nature, driven by either the commissions from the policies the company sells, or from long-term service contracts with the company’s clients that typically range from three to five years. Revenue across this business is seasonal and is generally higher in the fourth quarter as it is driven when typical annual enrollment activity occurs.
Risk & Broking
The Risk & Broking (‘R&B’) segment provides a broad range of risk advice, insurance brokerage, and consulting services to clients globally, ranging from small businesses to multinational corporations.
The segment comprises two primary businesses: the company’s Corporate Risk & Broking and its Insurance Consulting and Technology businesses.
Corporate Risk & Broking (‘CRB’)
The CRB business places premiums into the insurance markets on an annual basis and delivers integrated global solutions tailored to client needs. This is underpinned by data and analytics through a balanced matrix of global lines of business and local Property and Casualty businesses, across four geographical areas: North America, Great Britain, Western Europe, and International. Globally, and across the businesses, the company’s specialized and data-driven approach is underpinned by its risk analytics and climate analytics propositions.
Across all businesses, the company’s experts take an industry-focused approach to risk management and assessment, delivering broader perspectives and data-informed decision-making to its clients. The company’s lines of business include Property and Casualty, Affinity, Risk & Analytics, and its specialty global lines of business.
Property and Casualty — Property and Casualty, in each of the company’s geographical areas, provides property and liability insurance brokerage services across a wide range of industries and segments, including real estate, healthcare, and retail.
Affinity — Through Affinity, the company arranges insurance products and services for its affinity client partners to offer to their customers, employees, or members alongside, or in addition to, their principal business offerings.
Risk & Analytics (‘R&A’) — The company’s R&A offering includes deep expertise on specific client needs. Through the use of holistic analysis, R&A brings value through risk quantification and development of a robust portfolio risk strategy, ultimately delivering a sound financial approach to all clients.
The company’s specialty global lines of business include:
Aerospace — Aerospace provides specialist expertise to the aerospace and space industries. The company’s aerospace business provides insurance broking, risk management services, contractual and technical advisory expertise to aerospace clients globally, including airlines, aircraft manufacturers, air cargo handlers, and other airport and general aviation companies. The specialist InSpace team is also prominent in providing insurance and risk management services to the space industry.
Construction — The company’s Construction business provides services that include insurance broking, claims, loss control, and specialized risk advice for a wide range of construction projects and activities. Clients include contractors, project owners, public entities, project managers, consultants, and financiers, among others.
Global Markets Direct & Facultative — Operating in the major wholesale reinsurance hubs across the globe, including London, Bermuda, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, solutions are delivered both directly to clients for the most complex property and casualty risks and as facultative reinsurance placements where the company serves as an intermediary for insurance companies. Facultative solutions are provided across various classes of risk for its insurer clients. The aim is to deliver optimum results for its clients by getting the right risk to the right market by the right broker, be it local, wholesale, or facultative every time.
Financial, Executive and Professional Risks (‘FINEX’) — FINEX encompasses all financial and executive risks, delivering client solutions that range from management and professional liability, employment practices liability, crime, cyber, and M&A-related insurances to risk consulting and advisory services. Specialist teams provide risk consulting and risk transfer solutions to a broad spectrum of clients across a multitude of industries, as well as the financial and professional service sectors.
Financial Solutions — Financial Solutions provides insurance broking services and specialized risk advice related to credit and political risk. Clients include international banks, commodity traders, export credit agencies, and multinational corporations.
Crisis Management — The company’s global practice delivers crisis management and contingency risk management to multinational clients, providing comprehensive solutions around terrorism, political violence, accident and health, special crime, and active assailant.
Surety — The Global Surety team provides expertise in placing bonds across all industries and around the globe. A surety bond is a financial instrument that guarantees contractual performance, statutory compliance, and financial assurance for domestic and international companies.
Marine — Marine provides specialist expertise to the maritime and logistics industries. The company’s Marine business provides insurance broking services related to hull and machinery, cargo, protection and indemnity, fine art, and general marine liabilities, among others. The company’s Marine clients include, but are not limited to, ship owners and operators, shipbuilders, logistics operations, port authorities, traders, shippers, exhibitors, and secure transport companies.
Natural Resources — The company’s Natural Resources practice encompasses the oil, gas, and chemicals, mining and metals, power and utilities, and renewable energy sectors. It provides sector-specific risk transfer solutions and insights, which include insurance broking, risk engineering, contractual reviews, wording analysis, and claims management.
Insurance Consulting and Technology (‘ICT’)
ICT is a global business that provides advice and technology solutions to the insurance industry. The company leverages its industry experience, strategic perspective, and analytical skills to help clients measure and manage risk and capital, improve business performance, and create a sustainable competitive advantage. The company’s services include software and technology, risk and capital management, products and product pricing, financial and regulatory reporting, financial and capital modeling, M&A, outsourcing, and business management.
Competition
The company competes with firms, such as Aon plc, Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., Brown & Brown Inc., Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation, Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc. (Marsh & McLennan), and Robert Half International Inc., as well as with numerous specialty, regional, and local firms.
The company’s largest competitors in the pension consulting industry are Mercer HR Consulting (a Marsh & McLennan company) and Aon plc.
The company’s major competitors in the insurance consulting and software industry include Milliman, Oliver Wyman (a Marsh & McLennan company), the big four accounting firms (Deloitte LLP, Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and KPMG), and SunGard. Aon plc, Mercer (a Marsh & McLennan company), Automatic Data Processing, and Fidelity are among its largest competitors in the insurance exchange industry. The company also competes with the public health insurance exchanges currently run by the U.S. federal and state governments. The company also competes with providers of account-based health plans and consumer-directed benefits such as WageWorks and HealthEquity.
Regulation
The company is also subject to data privacy regulations that apply to health, medical, financial, and other types of personal information belonging to its employees, clients, and their employees and other third parties across most jurisdictions, including, among others, the E.U. and the U.K. General Data Protection Regulations, the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) in China, and privacy legislation in certain U.S. states, including the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA).
Furthermore, certain of the company’s activities are subject to regulation under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which is enforced by the Office for Civil Rights within the Department of Health and Human Services. As the company implements and expands its direct-to-consumer sales and marketing solutions through its Benefits Delivery & Administration business, it is subject to various federal and state laws and regulations that prescribe when and how it may market to consumers (including, without limitation, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and other telemarketing laws and the Medicare Communications and Marketing Guidelines issued by the Center for Medicare Services).
At the federal level, certain of the company’s operating subsidiaries are regulated by the SEC through the Investment Company Act of 1940 and the Investment Advisers’ Act of 1940, as well as by the Department of Labor through the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA. In connection with the SEC regulations, the company is required to file certain reports and is subject to various marketing restrictions, among other requirements. In connection with ERISA regulations, the company is limited in the actions it can take for plans for which it serves as fiduciaries, among other matters. The company’s U.S. investment activities are also subject to certain state regulatory schemes, and some activities are also subject to regulation by the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission under the Commodities Exchange Act.
The company’s activities in connection with Third Party Administrator (TPA) services in the United States are also subject to regulation and supervision by many state authorities.
In the U.K., the company’s business is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
Furthermore, as a result of Brexit, the WTW Brexit broking solution (the U.K. branch of Willis Towers Watson SA/NV) was required to seek authorization from the FCA as a third country branch. The branch is therefore subject to requirements in key areas such as SMCR and is also subject to the supervisory oversight of the Belgian Financial Services & Markets Authority.
Certain of the company’s entities that undertake pension scheme management are subject to MiFID (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) and MiFIR (the Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation).
History
The company was founded in 1828. The company was incorporated in 2009. It was formerly known as Willis Group Holdings Public Limited Company and changed its name to Willis Towers Watson Public Limited Company in 2016.
