Lori Goltermann, CEO of U.S. commercial risk and health at Aon PLC, oversees the brokerage’s U.S. retail business. In her more than 25 years at the brokerage, she has worked on both property/ casualty and health and benefits lines of business. Named one of the 2016 Business Insurance Women to Watch, Chicago-based Ms. Goltermann is one of the most senior female executives at Aon. She recently spoke with Business Insurance Editor Gavin Souter about the changing demands of risk managers, how the insurance sector is evolving and the ways technology will change the industry. Edited excerpts follow.

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Q: What are the top concerns of risk managers and how have they changed?

A: The top concerns of clients are switching from the traditional lines of business to the emerging risks they are facing. In our annual global risk management survey, 60% of the top 10 risks had no commercial solution. Cyber, for example, has over $300 billion in losses but only $3 billion in premium, so there’s a pretty big gap in the transferability of that risk.

The new thing that’s emerging is that for S&P 500 clients, 75% of their assets are now intangible assets. We are really focused on sitting down with our clients and spending time on how they are trying to grow their business, what new risks are coming with that growth strategy and then coming up with commercial solutions for them.

Q: Are those insurance solutions?

A: We are really focused on finding solutions on how clients want to protect their balance sheet, what risk do they want to keep in-house and how do they want to find a capital risk solution? Many times, there is a commercial solution available, oftentimes there is not. When you think about the digital transformation we are going through, with an account like Uber (Technologies Inc.), for example, we’ve had to literally create a market that’s on a per-usage basis as opposed to a per-vehicle basis. I think we are going to be experiencing a lot more of that as digital transformation changes how our customers interact with their clients and how they are distributing their goods.

Q: What are the positives and negatives of insurance industry consolidation?

A: There’s still a significant amount of mergers and acquisitions activity, and I think in every case the goal is to either increase the geographic footprint or increase the specialty capability. That’s always good for clients, and the seller usually comes out with a stronger balance sheet.

The negative side is really the integration risk. We are still a people business, a relationship business, so how will that integration impact the team that you’ve been working on for years? For any successful transaction to reach its full potential, focusing on the impact on the people and the relationships that you’ve had over a long period of time is really a critical piece of the equation.

Q: Technology has already disrupted personal lines distribution; how do you see it affecting commercial lines distribution?

A: Technology is really being embraced by all our clients. We use the term “digital transformation” and how it is affecting the client, so I see it in the strategies and the conversations that are happening where the clients are looking at different ways to access their customers, to have that customer experience, and they are embracing it when they think about how to distribute their products or even how their supply chain may change and alter as they embrace the digital transformation.

The conversations that we are having when we develop the commercial program are more robust, but the real opportunity to the industry is the insurtech space. There’s been over $1.7 billion invested in insurtech, and it’s largely, I think, a very useful tool to think about how we work together. How we will send a submission will change in the future, how we do that last mile of the policy placement. It’s an exciting time for everyone in our industry to think about how can we change the way we do some of the back-office and middle-office work so we can reinvest that time into the front end of the strategy.

This past hurricane season, we used drones as part of our assistance to clients to understand how damaged were their sites. We were able to look at a grocery store chain, send in the drone, send pictures to the client and help them determine where they could stand up a pop-up grocery store for the community and which sites had too much damage and we had to focus on debris removal. It’s wildly changing our commercial environment, and it’s going to be exciting to see what the next few years bring.

Q: What about risk assessment?

A: Technology and risk assessment is one of the key areas where our whole business is changing. The use of data and analytics to assess risk is where we’ll see the biggest change. This past year we looked at Aon and said, “What are all the tools that we can bring to clients?” and we cataloged almost 70 of those tools. They apply differently by industry, by client size, and we are thinking about ways that we will have clients both today and many more in the future that actually want to access that information in real time through their own portal.

An example might be CyQu, which is a technology tool that helps a client model their resiliency to a cyber attack. Every client of every size needs that type of tool, and we can put that on their desktop today. Not all clients want to access the tools directly — some still want to have their brokers bring the consulting and advisory work around them — but I think as we start to think about the risk manager of the future and those that are much more comfortable with technology, delivering these tools in a way that clients can access them directly to make better business decisions on how to take risk, that’s going to be how technology impacts our risks and how we assess them in the future.