Willis Towers Watson

And look, I want to say off the top, I enjoyed my time immensely at Mercer.

I got tremendous opportunities there, similar at Watson Wyatt, now WTW.

So I'm not going to necessarily come from a negative, but more from the perspective of what did...

At the time, Joe and Chris and I, what did we want to do differently and what did we feel was not an available choice in the marketplace? And we were seeing it from two perspectives.

They have to disclose all the assumptions and that kind of thing.

And there's a big report comes through Willis Towers Watson.

And that process was typically taking a couple of days before but at a year end when timelines were super tight and the accounting team wanted to be able to post everything and all of that kind of stuff.

And so we worked with them and we created a co-pilot agent process that effectively picked up all of that data from Towers Watson as well as the existing template from the previous year.

So we'd roll the previous year forward and then populate based on all the information.

And we created what's called semantic mapping.

I know I didn't learn how to balance a checkbook in school, right? That was not taught to us.

And what we see through data points externally through places like the Financial Health Network and through places like our partnerships with WTW and others is that the majority of working Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

Over 53% of Americans have under $500 in their emergency savings.

And I'll interrupt for a second.

And I imagine there's some data that suggests that when people have their financial crises managed, that they become better employees.

Yes.

WTW has a very famous published study that financial insecurity costs employers three to four thousand dollars per employee per year.

And that could be on an assortment of things that comes to life in absenteeism, sick days, and it comes to life in unwanted attrition.

It's been running for 12 years, over 1,000 events across 40 countries and 200,000 attendees.

So Sir Charles Roxburgh, Lloyd's chair, and Gabby Joyner from WTW said it'd been hugely successful and they acknowledged it led to a lot of positive changes in the market.

But it was right to take, the way they phrased it, it was like we needed to take stock and see what the market needed.

And they were keen to say that diversity, inclusion and belonging would still be central to the new programme, but they're still keeping those details.

And if you want a little bit more info on reflections around dive in, I recorded a in-depth podcast, which is out on the podcast page.

You can go and check it out.

We have Catherine Conway and Jen Demby of Aon and WTW, respectively.

And they've both been involved in dive in since the start.

So I would say lots to be excited for.

Your first jobs were in Mumbai working as an analyst for WTW.

You're now a partner at reinsurance broker McGill and Partners specializing in direct insurance.

What are the particular skills needed for you to do that role and what do you enjoy the most about it?

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Pensions Perspective podcast brought to you by WTW.

I'm your host Sophie Tennyson and I'm an investment consultant here and today I'm joined by two colleagues from our Leeds office and it's very exciting for those who are watching on YouTube you'll notice that we are in a different studio and just like Andy Burnham's number 10 the Pensions Perspective podcast has been on the road and we've come up north which is very exciting.

Hopefully you'll have some subtitles for the video.

Ben is a strategic advisor and he's one of the architects of our Think, Act, Invest framework, which hopefully some of our listeners saw a previous podcast on.

and Chris is one of our DB portfolio specialists so he's working on portfolio construction for some of our largest DB run-on portfolios.

Would you both like to introduce yourself to our listeners and maybe give an outline of the role that you have at WTW?

Well thank you very much for having me I'm looking forward to this.

So I'm a managing director at WTW I've been here for coming to 17 years now, I think, or over 17 years actually.

He brings over 35 years of leadership experience spanning nuclear submarine service as a U.S.

Naval officer, strategy and organization consulting at Willis Towers Watson, and global VP level leadership at Cargill.

He holds engineering degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Memphis, along with an MBA from Northwestern.

Kerry, again, welcome to Leadership Growth Podcast.