For two and a half decades, this website was rendered in the third person. As an expression of the continuing importance of the human factor in an industry that sometimes undervalues it, I will now present myself in the first person.
I, William M. Tilford, FLMI, CLU, Certified FALU, Fellow (ALUCA), officially established Tilford Consulting in 2000 after being an independent consultant to life and health insurance underwriting departments since 1994. Health insurance risk selection ended with the Affordable Care Act of 2008, after which time I focused more narrowly on life insurance and life settlements risk selection with an occasional side of disability income insurance.
During my corporate period from 1983-1994, first at what was then Benefit Trust Life Insurance Company (now Trustmark), later Bankers Life and Casualty in Chicago, I rose from production underwriter to team manager and then chief underwriter at BLC. Along the way, I gained experience with managing and training underwriters, developing underwriting guidelines, and representing the company's underwriting department in litigation. In an alternate timeline, I might have become something like a senior underwriting VP somewhere, but I learned fairly early that as much as I enjoyed the underwriting profession itself, I did not much care for the necessary but tedious administrative minutiae of corporate life or the inevitable organizational politics that often accompanied it. In 1994, after looking about the industry and realizing that I did not see a corporate executive that I wanted to become, I opted for the consulting life instead. In the beginning, that was not as easy as I had expected it to be, but with time, hard work and perseverance, I became an established and respected presence in the industry. One of the keys to that success is that I probably treat my clients better than many employees treat their employers and vice versa.
Since 1994, I have assisted over a dozen direct carriers and reinsurers on a non-employee basis with everything from production underwriting support to underwriting auditing to technical writing and special projects. In more recent years, most of my life insurance activity has been underwriting auditing with a little time on the production line and the occasional expert witness project. For many years, I was considered one of the best contract underwriters available by several companies.
Although I am an informed skeptic regarding the occasional misuse of some poorly-designed underwriting engines and algorithms in our industry, I was into data before it was cool. A graduate of the University of Chicago (BA, Political Science), I was an Assistant Survey Director at the National Opinion Research Center prior to moving to the life insurance industry.. NORC's clients then were federal departments dong advanced social and economic studies. The Reagan administration's cuts in social science and economic research contracts prompted a career change, a happy one in retrospect. After joining the life insurance industry, one of my first special projects was developing an unit cost spreadsheet for BTL's underwriting department.
On the volunteer front, I have an extensive history with underwriting associations and the Society of Actuaries, serving for several years as the Vice Chair of the SOA's Committee on Life Insurance Mortality and Underwriting Surveys until it was disbanded in 2021, and later as a member of the SOA Research Institute Mortality Expert Panel for a couple of reports; a term as Vice President, External Relations for the Association of Home Office Underwriters, and a term as chair of the International Underwriting Study Group. I also mentored the revivals of underwriting associations in Chicago, the Carolinas and Texas and have authored and coauthored several industry articles and reports.
Tilford Consulting is a one-man operation by design to help assure a commitment to quality and reliability. Some projects have been long-term (one as long as seven years), with repeats common, but short term projects are also welcome.
I take confidentiality, excellence, ethics, mutual respect and dependability quite seriously - these are the things that have kept the business thriving for decades.
In April, 2023, I was inducted into the Association of Home Office Underwriters (AHOU) Hall of Fame, its highest honor for home office underwriters.
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