EXCLUSIVE: “It’s Good to Share” – Veronica Judice, Aon in ‘The Insurtech Magazine’

Aon is on a mission to unlock data across the insurance chain, as Veronica Judice explains

“Data analytics is central to our strategy. We really believe that power is in the data, and that knowledge is in the data and experience.”

So says Veronica Judice, who heads up the claims practice of Aon’s Strategy & Technology Group (STG), and leads on claims transformation for the reinsurance giant. Her job is to find ways to optimise the claims operations using digital technology. It’s not a solitary pursuit. Rather, it involves everyone, from reinsurer to distributor to broker to ultimate client, and includes broker/ client data, underwriter data, claims data, and third-party administrators’ data – all of it often in different formats.

“It is a consulting process, we listen to our clients to understand their changing needs and leverage on data to meet those needs,” says Judice. “One of the challenges that insurance is facing right now is that there is an enormous amount of data that’s not necessarily shared among industry stakeholders. If we could improve sharing the data, that would give us a better picture of what’s going on, lessons learned that turn into a prediction of how things could go [in the future]. And that would bring clarity and confidence to make better decisions and improve risk management.

“What we’re trying to do is ensure the market can use the vast amount of data we have to resolve the clients’ needs.”

It’s not that the sector is financially challenged, stunting innovation – today’s healthy reinsurance market ‘presents opportunities for insurers to leverage reinsurance capital to support growth plans, manage volatility and/or alleviate capital constraints’, according to Aon’s mid-year Reinsurance Market Dynamics report.

But sharing unified data is nevertheless proving a challenge, says Judice. The industry comprises not only a patchwork of disjointed, disparate data, but also a mindset that’s difficult to change in some areas. Aon put as much thought into managing its human capital as its technology estate when it introduced its Strategy & Technology Group in late 2022 to bring together insights and software solutions to help reinsurance clients build flexible and resilient enterprise structures.

“We use data to create insights and thus monitor and improve process performance and product, helping clients shape better results,” says Judice.

“There’s so much data but it comes from different sources. How do we make it more uniform to support claims processes?”

But the whole industry is still in the foothills of transformation when it comes to feeding those workflows with the information it needs, adds Judice, who has been with Aon for around 10 years.

“We have so much data, but it comes from all different sources. So how do we make it more uniform and consistent to support claims processes? That is what we are working on now, and what, I think, the entire insurance industry is trying to work at now. If we just could put the data together in a more organic way and look at it more holistically, we could really improve the use of it.”

INTERVIEWEE SPOTLIGHT

Originally from Milan, Veronica Judice studied business and economy at university before moving to law school in Italy. She finished her qualification in the US where she sat her exams for the Bar in New York. Judice says she took law because she wanted to make a difference to people’s lives. But, having practised in the insurance industry, she realised that it had an equally big impact on economies, businesses and individuals.

Her career at Aon started in claims before working on strategy with insurance carriers within Aon and later returning to the claims arena.

“I focus on commercial insurance,” says Judice. “We deal with the carriers that are our reinsurance clients, but it all trickles down to individuals. It has a tangible impact on people’s lives and the economy in general. And I really like that.

This article was published in The Insurtech Magazine Issue 11, Page 19