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Chris Wyard
Talking data leadership with Chris Wyard, Chief Data Officer at Beazley
Decentralising data ownership to enhance decision-making
Decentralising data ownership to enhance decision-making
Talking data leadership with Chris Wyard, Chief Data Officer at Beazley
With an emphasis on getting the data function close to its internal customers, Chris Wyard is leading a federated data product strategy at Beazley, the specialist insurance business that values being bold and striving for better.
Chris shared his approach to building and leading teams and creating stronger data literacy across the wider business. Plus, would it be a TechExec piece if we didn’t ask for a vision for the future? Read on to get his thoughts on what’s going to be big for the sector in coming years.
SHARING THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR BEING DATA-DRIVEN
When Chris stepped into the role at Beazley in July 2022, he brought with him a depth of experience from Allianz, where he spent 16 years rising from an IT graduate to Chief Data Officer.
And in the two years he’s been at Beazley, Chris has helped to establish a data office and enhance the role of data there. Key to this has been his focus on connecting data teams to the business, rather than seeing it as a centralised, separate entity.
Chris expanded on this when he told us, “The belief system I have is that we need to embed and leverage data as close to our stakeholders and
business processes as we can. Data can’t be an afterthought and should be available to help steer and drive our decisions. Now more than ever, there’s significant potential and opportunity if you can harness data capabilities effectively, unlocking significant potential across your business.”
While he’s used a range of methods to do this in the past, more recently he’s been designing it into the operating model, aligning domain teams for each data solution – or product, as Chris thinks of them – embedded into relevant business domains.
This data product strategy challenges the business to engage with data and ‘think data’.
Chris noted that this requires having the right guardrails and enablers around data governance, data quality and data management components, so there’s a level of cohesion about how these teams are working.
He shared, “We've been spending time in the last 12 to 18 months enhancing our data policy and our data management framework, implementing new solutions that will help us share and make data more available and accessible. All of this is creating ownership opportunities for data in the business.”
Chris Wyard
Chief Data Officer at Beazley
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Strategy
Delivery
Change
CREATING A POSITIVE DATA CULTURE
In any organisation, it’s not just about having the best team possible, it’s also about creating a positive culture for that team to grow and deliver within to the best of their ability. To support this at Beazley, they’ve been working on the psychological safety of the data team.
Chris shared, “What we've tried to do is remove that interpersonal risk about speaking up or disagreeing around the data, making sure we surface all the concerns that would exist so that we can deliver the best products and the best kind of service. So culturally, we're trying to make sure that the team has that environment both to interface with their stakeholders and then subsequently deliver into the business.”
The other thing which Chris considers compelling from a team perspective is helping them feel like they're working to common goals and objectives, “That alignment around activity and objective is quite key and we're seeing the benefits of that as we rebuild data products and share them with the business.”
IMPROVING OUTCOMES THROUGH DATA
With the data culture changing and the operating model embedding, Chris and his team have been focusing on four main themes where data can deliver value across the Beazley business.
First there’s productivity – what capacity can they unlock and provide back to the business through automation and AI to drive efficiencies and reuse of data, whilst helping decommission legacy environments.
Simplification and the level of efficiency that can be achieved as a result of leveraging the data foundations and capabilities that have been put into the data organisation is another focus.
As is maximising product coverage. Chris explains that in Beazley’s case, this is about contributing to business growth by enhancing their understanding of business outcomes by leveraging data and AI more effectively.
And last but importantly, derisking and making sure the control environment is well managed, ensuring Beazley is well-prepared to manage future opportunities and the development of regulatory requirements.
DATA TO DRIVE EFFICIENCIES
Chris took us through some of the work that’s gone into delivering on these themes. “We're making good progress around enhanced understanding of our business, with a strong focus around building new, improved datasets that we can reuse to drive analytics, insight and intelligence into our business and to ensure that we truly support the delivery of enhanced business outcomes from our data strategy.”
The approach to Mastering Customer data is being supported by a data management consultancy that delivers measurable results through a combination of expert consultancy and best-in-breed technology, which will provide consolidated data and intelligence across Beazley.
The Beazley team has also spent time building a new modern data architecture based on cloud where they’re publishing trusted reusable data products, “They’re more available with greater standardisation and more granularity than we've ever had in our business before” Chris explained.
“Our approach to data products requires us to focus on delivering data to our stakeholders that adds immediate value and more granular insights. It is critical that data products are designed to embed new insight into our business processes and that these are reused wherever possible. We also need to ensure that the data products are designed and adopted in way that ensures they quickly become the authoritative source of
Beazley data and definition in their respective domain.”
A global digital engineering partner is helping them build the data products and establish a factory approach so that they can increasingly deliver to the business need and iterate as requirements develop.
And a technology consultancy partner that specialises in building tailor-made mission critical platforms and that has in-depth expertise in financial services has developed the data platform with Beazley.
ENHANCED DATA CAPTURE TO DRIVE ADVANTAGE
With insurers having to carefully plan approaches to conditions that lead to claims, this is something that previously took a great deal of work in terms of optimising the approach to natural catastrophes and how they think about accumulation of risk.
Chris shared, “One of the most effective ways to optimise that process is by having enhanced data enrichment and leveraging unstructured data. I've done a lot of work in the past in General Insurance to move from postcode-level or zip code-level insights down to looking at the actual building and the use of satellite imagery to enhance our understanding of risk, and create new opportunities to drive competitive advantage about what we understand in terms of our portfolio and also its susceptibility to loss and claims events.”
LEVERAGING MACHINE LEARNING
Machine learning and AI have a big part to play in improving performance among other areas and the team at Beazley is using this in a number of ways.
Chris explained, “A broker will provide a submission to Beazley (typically a document or email) and we've been looking at how we take that unstructured submission, extract the data and reuse it into our systems and processes, so we are more efficient and reuse data effectively across all key parts of the insurance lifecycle.”
There's also opportunities around underwriting and claims, looking at patterns and trends, “What's important is anything that helps with speed. So how can we go from a whole host of unstructured data that enters our business being untapped, to ensuring we pull out the right information from these sources, the right nuggets of intelligence, and create decisionready outcomes for our teams? It’s about that fast time to market.”
Being market leading from a research perspective is also important – being able to look at insured assets and use data, machine learning or AI to drive out more intelligence that supports decisions and provide an edge. The team is looking at opportunities to structure data and insights from a diverse range of sources and provide an enhanced understanding of business performance and risk.
BUILDING DATA LITERACY ACROSS THE BUSINESS
Doing all this work requires a skilled team, but it also requires a shift in data culture within the business.
As well as a new data policy that provides guidelines and procedures about how the operating model, the culture around data products and federated ownership will change how data is collected, stored, processed, and managed across the business.
The business has also been investing in learning and development initiatives. A data literacy academy is due to launch in 2025 where colleagues can develop their understanding of data visualisation, data storytelling and data management principles. Chris tells us this is, “All with the aim of raising our internal capability, so that data’s not this thing that's happening to the business, but they're connected and part of that journey.”
They’ve also launched a new data library using a data catalogue partner that has a knowledge graph architecture to support with availability and accessibility of data. Chris explained, “One of the big challenges that needed to be overcome was we have lots of data, but at times it's availability or its accuracy or its provenance was not always fully understood.
“We now have a central repository that outlines all of our ownership and all our reporting dashboards. We've got hundreds and hundreds of users who have access to thousands and thousands of pieces of content.”
“We're constantly refining and refreshing that as an approach to make sure it reflects what's being used in the business and that it's relevant in terms of the content that we're sharing and, going forwards, we would like to evolve this to become more of an interaction and engagement hub for our data.”
That’s not all. They've also been looking at data lineage as a capability to provide a more holistic view about how data flows across the organisation. This is supporting them to pinpoint challenges or remediate any concerns that emerge in terms of their data processing and transformations across the organisation.
Chris explains, “Many of those capabilities are built out on a new platform. We're currently streaming enhanced data into our underwriting tools. Alongside the development of internal data, the use of unstructured sources, and third-party enrichment has also progressed.
“And we’re making sure that all of that data is catalogued so that in the areas of machine learning and AI we use the right data and have the right controls and governance around what data is being used across the business.
BUILDING A BALANCED TEAM
As you may have guessed, it’s not just the business-wide data culture that’s changing, but the data team too – both in terms of its footprint, its structure and its make-up.
Working on their operating model and a commitment to reflecting the global nature of Beazley’s
business has led to an expanded presence in the USA. This has given Chris the opportunity to do targeted recruitment to bring new expertise in-house, with successful new starters having curiosity, a product mindset and the ability to demonstrate that partnership and stakeholder engagement is part of their toolbox – which is important as the data team looks to federate capability and partner with business.
Chris explained that although their data team has historically been based in the London market for insurance, they want a data team that’s able to support territories that operate under different regulatory considerations and in different landscapes.
Chris noted, “In doing that, I think we've opened ourselves up to a broader talent pool. Of course, a focus on diversity and inclusion underpinned our recruitment efforts and we're pleased and delighted with the team that we've been able to create. The data team is balanced from a gender perspective, and we are representative in the other D&I characteristics.”
A FOCUS ON THE FUTURE OF DATA
With so much work underway at present, we wondered what Chris is keeping an eye on when it comes to the future of data and analytics withing the insurance industry.
Sharing data within the sector is something that he thinks needs to be a key focus. Chris stated, “I think there's been progress, but in an environment where we are often using similar technologies or similar cloud environments,
my view is that there's still far too many frictional costs and what I call integration taxes for us to optimise our use of broader industry data and partnerships.”
“I think that there's an opportunity for us to leverage AI, modern platforms and capabilities to be more innovative with how we approach some of the opportunities in the market. I believe we can be collectively better about sharing data (where there is business opportunity and justification) with our partners and unlocking new opportunities.”
And as is to be expected when considering the future, AI emerges as a topic. “From a Beazley perspective, we see many opportunities afforded by AI. We have dedicated teams working to deliver on our AI objectives. Again, these come back to relatively simple themes of how do we increase the speed and accuracy of manual tasks and reduce the risk of errors?”
In the insurance sector, this could be harnessing AI to read, summarise and extract data from underwriting and claims documentation, as well as more common themes such as looking at using the potential for AI to improve decision-making and enrich the work and productivity of teams.
Chris commented, “Across the board in insurance, I think there's still too much manual toil. Everyone, I think, would benefit and would be more highly motivated and engaged by less friction in our day-to-day access to data and use of business systems.”
There’s also a focus to deploy AI responsibly and effectively, using key ethical principles such as fairness, transparency and human accountability
To support this, Beazley has a new, dedicated governance committees for AI that are representative of the business.
With all that Chris has covered, it’s clear that – for a team that’s already achieved a great deal in just two years – there’s plenty more on the horizon. It’s worth keeping an eye out for what they’ll accomplish in the next two years.
