Interview with Barry Franklin of Towers Watson
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ILSTV sat down with Barry Franklin, Director in the Corporate Risk Management Practice of Towers Watson, about the role of today’s risk managers and the challenges they face.
Barry Franklin: I think if you were to summarize it one sentence, risk managers are doing a lot more with a lot less. Because of the economy over the last several years risk managers have had to reduce staff levels, rely more on outside providers.
The thing that’s helped them is that we have been in a long, protracted soft market, so they’ve been able to take some of the savings on insurance premiums and focus the attention on controlling the frequency and severity of claims, implementing safety programs and things of that nature.
I think partly due to RIMS educational efforts risk managers have stepped up their game. They’re more conversant in the financial aspects of risk management than perhaps they were a decade ago, and I think that just continues to improve.
I think there has been a lot of advances in technology to help risk managers. Start with basics; just a claims reporting system. We take it for granted now that you can look at a body of claims and understand frequency and severity by location, and maybe look for areas in your organization that are problematic.
Even as recently as ten years ago that was a challenge for a lot of companies. So I think that on the one hand that has enabled risk managers to do their job more effectively, it’s also given them one more task to do. It’s become expected that they’re conversant in what’s going on in their claims.
And emerging technologies in the area of governance risk and compliance risk, managers are getting involved in, I think will continue to present challenges and opportunities to risk managers.
If you think about it, risk managers are serving multiple constituencies: their employers, their employees. They’ve got service providers like brokers and actuaries, and then the insurance markets. It’s a battle to keep those in balance.
And then their primary job, if you think about it, managing risk. Expect the unexpected. Focus on those areas that are emerging. So it’s actually a very interesting career and it’s a challenging one.
