Tilford Consulting brings a unique mix of skill sets to this portion of our service menu. In addition to being a former Chief Underwriter, William M. Tilford, FLMI, CLU, Certified FALU, Fellow (ALUCA) was also an Assistant Survey Director at the National Opinion Research Center prior to beginning his insurance career in the 1980s. This gave him an introduction to statistical analysis, most importantly how to consider data, studies and reports with an objective, critical eye, that has served well in his insurance career. In the 1990s, in addition to insurance consulting projects, he also assisted on a project basis with data collection and database editing for federally-funded studies of consumer finances and medical expenses. If your company has need of research related to its underwriting or life expectancy activities, you may be in the right place.
AUDITS, QUALITY ASSURANCE AND PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
The audits performed by your own internal auditors, MIB and your reinsurers tell you a few important things about the general performance of your underwriting department in terms of meeting their standards and needs, but is that really all you need to know? In this age of accelerated underwriting and algorithmic risk selection, those methods, while necessary, may not always be enough to consider all of the right questions. Most of Tilford Consulting's revenue during the past several years has come from auditing of both conventional and accelerated/algorithmic underwriting cases. If you are seeking an objective, third party look "under the hood" from someone able to communicate effectively with both underwriters and data scientists, you are in the right place.
SPECIALIZED WRITING AND EDITING PROJECTS
Tilford Consulting offers a variety of educational and technical writing services for life and health insurance underwriting departments, working with you to assure that the special nuances of your company's products, markets and experience level are taken into account when producing your materials.
PRODUCTION UNDERWRITING SUPPORT
Selecting risks is an important service in the industry, so this, along with life expectancy work for life settlement providers, is still an available service. Four decades of experience and the ability to play without a net when needed are worth something, so Tilford Consulting will not be your most inexpensive option for those services, but if reliability and quality are more important than price, you are in the right place.
LITIGATION CONSULTING
This service is vended to attorneys rather than to insurance companies and has always been an incidental part of Tilford Consulting's revenue, but four decades in the business do add up over time. Tilford Consulting is extremely selective about clients for this service, taking a small percentage of referrals. Cases involving past, present or probable future clients for other services are not accepted. Also, since our professional credibility is critical to the success of our core business, we must be thoroughly convinced of the validity of the matter about which we are testifying before we will accept a case. These two filters quickly screen out most of the inquiries that we receive for this service. In cases which can clearly pass both of these tests, we do provide a full range of expert witness services for both plaintiffs and defendants. We have also provided expert assistance in cases concerning the effects of a medical event on possible future insurability and possible future mortality.
UNDERWRITER TRAINING AND MENTORING
We do not aggressively market this service because we believe that underwriter training is best done the old-fashioned way: internally, using the apprentice system combined with the industry's educational programs. This is the way that we learned our trade, and we still believe in it. However, the modern economic realities of many underwriting operations can often make this difficult and occasionally even nearly impossible. In addition to his past experience with training underwriters, Mr. Tilford has also provided training and educational presentations in many non-insurance settings including non-profit groups, high school students, musicians and political activists. We do not vend a prefabricated program to the industry, but if your company is having underwriter training issues and lacks the resources to resolve these on your own, we can work with you to help determine what can be done to improve your situation.