The Travelers Promise:
Taking Care of Our Customers,
Our Communities and Our Employees
2019 Annual Report
The Travelers Companies, Inc.
The Travelers Promise is our commitment to take care of our customers, our communities and our employees. This includes providing our customers with the security they need to invest in their families and businesses and being there to help them recover after a disaster. It also includes caring for the communities in which we live and work through good times and bad. We do this by supporting academic and career success, and by promoting the development of thriving neighborhoods and enriched communities. Finally, it is about making Travelers a great place to work for the best talent in the industry and a great partner for our agents and brokers. In the end, the Travelers Promise is about taking care of the people we are privileged to serve.
Helping Our Customers Protect What Is Important to Them
We provide coverages our customers need to protect the things that are important to them – their homes, their cars, their valuables and their businesses. We are developing products and services to meet consumers where they are, and we are creating solutions that put our expertise directly in the hands of our customers. By providing the protections our customers need in a simple, straightforward manner, we are giving them the confidence to achieve their personal and business goals – whether that means a bigger car for a growing family or a bigger facility for a growing business. Below are a few examples of how we help our customers protect what is important to them.
In 2019, we continued the successful rollout of our Quantum Home 2.0 product, which is now available in 36 states and the District of Columbia. Through its rebuilt quote and issue system, Quantum Home 2.0 makes it easier than ever to tailor flexible and cost-effective coverage packages and specialty options for home and condo owners, tenants and landlords. Its granular pricing segmentation, customizable coverages and ease of quoting offer a sophisticated and simple solution that delivers value to both customers and agents.
In 2019, we began the launch of our BOP (Business Owner Policy) 2.0 product. With input from our agents, we have made the quoting experience faster and easier with simplified screens, fewer questions, more customer information prefill and modernized business classifications. We also adjusted our pricing, introduced new discounts and provided flexible offerings that allow agents to package coverages in a way that best meets the needs of our customers.
Our Risk ToolworksSM mobile app helps customers protect their businesses and keep their employees safe by providing real-time access to interactive risk management tools and resources that help our customers monitor workplace hazards, track safety tasks and evaluate safety considerations, among other things. For example, using the app, customers can access Travelers’ online construction vibration tool, ZoneCheckSM, which is designed to help identify potential equipment-generated ground vibration risks. ZoneCheck centralizes industry-recognized ground vibration data for construction equipment by soil types. With just a few inputs, ZoneCheck calculates how far ground vibrations can extend to surrounding structures or people in order to establish or refine preconstruction surveys and develop measures to help mitigate against damage caused by vibration-generating work.
Our new Quantum
Home 2.0® product
Travelers BOP 2.0
Mobile risk management app
for business customers.
Helping Our Customers and
Their Employees Stay Healthy
We offer various products and services designed to maximize the wellness of our customers and their employees, enable workplace safety and ensure that when work-related injuries do occur, injured employees can return to work as soon as they are able. Below are a few examples of how our innovative products help our customers and their employees stay healthy.
By analyzing claim data, we created the Early Severity Predictor model to help forecast which injured employees are the most at risk for chronic pain and therefore opioid addiction. Since its inception in 2015, our Early Severity Predictor has benefited more than 65,000 injured employees, resulting in a substantial reduction in surgeries performed and opioids prescribed, as well as a more rapid return to work by impacted employees. We estimate that this has resulted in loss cost savings of more than $150 million. Today, we apply this model to 100% of the workers compensation lost time claims that we receive.
In response to the evolving needs of our customers and their injured employees, we have made a number of investments in our workers compensation claims-handling model, TravComp®. For example, we introduced our self-service workers compensation claim portal, MyTravelers for Injured Employees. Through this innovative platform, injured employees are empowered to engage in their return-to-work journey and interact with us digitally throughout the claim process. In-portal claim notifications, messaging with claim and medical professionals, two-way document sharing and tailored digital content help ensure we quickly get the right claim information into the hands of injured employees.
Our Travelers ConciergeCLAIM Nurse program provides a one-on-one connection between one of our 500 registered nurses and an injured employee, helping those employees find access to quality health care, stay engaged in the claim process and return to work as soon as medically appropriate. By placing nurse case managers in local health care clinics across the United States, the Travelers ConciergeCLAIM Nurse program has reduced days out of work by 35%.
Early Severity Predictor®
MyTravelers® for Injured Employees
ConciergeCLAIM®
Nurse program
Helping Our Customers Through a Loss
Whether an insurance policy is sold to an individual or a business, the policy represents our promise to be there for our customers in the event of a covered loss. Making sure our customers understand the scope of their coverage is an important part of our claim process – a process that also includes sharing timely identification and communication of applicable coverages and limits. For certain claim types, our dedicated loss consultants are available to provide our customers with information about coverages, deductibles and the probable impact to loss history before a claim is filed to help them make an informed decision that is in their best interest. The following examples illustrate how we are using technology to help our customers through a loss.
Thanks to innovative virtual inspection and measurement technology, we are able to transform smartphone photos of a property into an accurate, three-dimensional model so that our claim professionals can easily inspect property damage without climbing ladders, and our policyholders can provide information without having to schedule an on-site inspection. In other words, we are creating a faster and easier claim process for our customers, and a safer environment for our employees.
The Travelers Catastrophe Map Viewer provides agents and brokers with searchable, high-resolution before-and-after images of areas affected by disasters. This new capability also provides our claim professionals with the ability to quickly assess damage and begin the claim process – often before physical access to the affected area is possible.
We have developed several new Travelers products and services to help our customers mitigate wildfire risk and recover more quickly from wildfire damage. As just one example, we are working with Wildfire Defense Systems (WDS) to give California home and landlord policyholders an added layer of wildfire protection at no additional cost. WDS uses proprietary forecasting and threat analysis to identify which Travelers customers could be impacted by a wildfire, and then assists them in taking preventive measures.
Using Smartphones for Quicker, Safer Claim Inspections
Using Satellite and Geospatial Technology to View Disaster Areas
Wildfire Loss Prevention and Recovery
Travelers can only have a thriving, sustainable business if our communities are thriving, too. To that end, our connection to the community is fundamental to our company, and it is one of the reasons we work to foster resilience and opportunity in the communities we serve. Below are highlights from our community-focused initiatives.
Our signature career pipeline program, Travelers EDGE (Empowering Dreams for Graduation and Employment), aims to increase the number of underrepresented students who complete a bachelor’s degree and are prepared for a career at Travelers or elsewhere in our industry. Since its inception in 2007, Travelers EDGE has provided financial support, professional development and mentoring to more than 500 students.
Several years ago, we joined forces with Habitat for Humanity® and the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety to build affordable, wind-resistant homes to FORTIFIED HomeTM standards throughout the United States. In 2019, we expanded that program to include a FORTIFIED building pilot with SBP (formerly the St. Bernard Project), a nonprofit organization that works to shorten the time between disaster and recovery. Through these partnerships, we have helped build nearly 100 FORTIFIED homes for low-income families. In addition, data gathered from the FORTIFIED program helps promote better building codes in hurricane-prone regions and demonstrate the affordability of building to FORTIFIED standards.
Travelers is committed to raising awareness about disaster preparedness and the importance of improving response-and-recovery actions after major events. To that end, we offered a $100,000 Travelers Excellence in Community Resilience Award through our charitable giving arm, the Travelers Foundation, and our public policy division, the Travelers Institute®. In 2019, we were pleased to present the award to Rebuilding Together, Inc., to support the launch of the organization’s new program aimed at educating communities about the essentials of safely restoring homes after disasters.
Travelers is the exclusive insurance sponsor of Team Rubicon’s Mobile Training Center, which provides large-scale training events, recruits volunteers and establishes relationships with state and local emergency management agencies to help communities across the United States prepare for, and recover from, catastrophes. Throughout 2018 and 2019, Travelers provided funding for Team Rubicon to begin scaling its rebuild program, which focuses not only on large catastrophes but also on low-attention disasters – that is, devastating weather events that impact communities but are not large enough in scale to draw media attention and resources from the government and philanthropic organizations.
The Travelers Small Business Risk Education (SBRE) program leverages our employees’ expertise to help women-, minority- and veteran-owned small businesses learn about risk management and business continuity, develop safety risk management plans and qualify for microloans. During 2019, nearly 500 entrepreneurs attended our SBRE workshops. We also launched a partnership with the venture capital firm Village Capital to provide investment-readiness and risk management education through the SBRE curriculum to six diverse entrepreneurial support organizations focused on social enterprise, innovation and access to capital.
The Travelers Championship is an annual stop on the PGA TOUR, which showcases how our company and our employees maintain a strong commitment to the communities in which we live and work. All net proceeds from the Travelers Championship go to charities throughout the Greater Hartford region. Since Travelers became title sponsor in 2007, the tournament has generated nearly $20 million for more than 750 local charities, including more than $2.1 million for 150 nonprofits in 2019. The event is also a popular volunteer opportunity for Travelers employees; more than 1,700 employees volunteered at the 2019 Travelers Championship. The value of the tournament – Connecticut’s largest sporting event – extends beyond charitable giving. A recent survey by the Connecticut Economic Resource Center estimated that the average annual economic impact from the tournament is nearly $70 million.
The Travelers Institute has long recognized that every driver, passenger, cyclist and pedestrian has a role to play in enhancing roadway safety. To that end, in 2017, the Travelers Institute launched the Every Second MattersSM education campaign to help combat distracted driving. The campaign is founded on three key principles: creating a social stigma around distracted driving; increasing the situational awareness of all roadway users, including pedestrians and cyclists; and examining scalable technology and insurtech solutions. In 2019, the campaign hosted nearly 30 educational programs at universities and at industry and safety conferences in communities across the United States, and released two new “Unfinished Stories” videos, which honor real victims of distracted driving by telling their stories through a series of animated shorts.
Travelers EDGE®:
Transforming Tomorrow's Workforce
Building FORTIFIED Homes
Rewarding Leadership
in Community Response
Team Rubicon Sponsorship
Empowering Small
Business Owners
The Travelers Championship®:
Our Signature Community Event
Combating
Distracted Driving
We owe our success to Travelers’ extraordinary talent. The expertise of our approximately 30,000 employees is critical to maintaining our competitive advantages in a rapidly evolving business landscape. Our employees collectively drive our performance and fuel our innovation agenda. Fostering a thriving, vibrant and authentic culture is essential to attracting and retaining talented, diverse and qualified employees. We also know that when employees and their families are healthy – physically, emotionally and financially – they can be more fully engaged, both personally and professionally. Below are just a few of the ways we take care of our employees.
Our compensation programs are designed to attract, motivate and retain high-performing talent. Our long-standing pay-for-performance philosophy rewards individual and company performance, regardless of gender, race or any other protected classification. In the United States, we have increased the minimum hourly wage to $15. The median total compensation of our employees was more than $111,000, and the median total compensation of our full-time U.S. employees, who comprise over 90% of our workforce, was nearly $128,000, as calculated and reported in our 2020 Proxy Statement for 2019, putting us in the top quartile of the S&P 500.
In 2019, approximately $450 million went to providing our employees with security in their retirement through pension payments and credits and 401(k) matching contributions. We offer our employees a pension plan that is 100% funded by Travelers and does not require them to contribute personally. Travelers also annually matches employee 401(k) contributions dollar for dollar up to the first 5% of eligible pay, up to a maximum of $7,000. We also launched an innovative new benefit in 2019 that eliminates the tough choice many employees face of paying down student debt or saving for retirement. The Travelers Paying It Forward Savings Program allows our employees to focus on paying off student debt while we help them grow their retirement savings. When an employee makes a payment toward their student loan, Travelers contributes that amount into that employee’s 401(k) savings plan account.
We offer comprehensive benefit options for our employees, which include medical, dental and prescription drug coverage; flexible spending accounts; life insurance; paid time off; short- and long-term disability; parental leave; child care discounts; and preventive care incentives. Employees and their dependents and partners (including, for more than 20 years, same-sex domestic partners) are generally eligible for coverage beginning the first day of employment. To keep rates affordable, we subsidize premiums on health care plans through a progressive, cost-sharing model. In other words, our higher-paid employees pay a significantly higher percentage of the cost of their health benefits as compared to our lower-paid employees.
- In the United States, our medical plans cover 52,000 individuals, including employees, children, spouses and domestic partners. In 2019, we paid approximately $240 million in medical-related costs on behalf of our employees and their dependents.
- In our international operations, we provide medical coverage that supplements government-provided plans to our 2,000 employees and their families, subsidizing the employee health benefit costs between 90% and 100%.
We also offer easy-to-use tools and resources that support employees in achieving their wellness goals. These programs include a robust Employee Assistance Program, which offers a variety of services such as professional counseling and work-life seminars; discounts at health clubs; discounted weight management and tobacco cessation programs; wellness screenings; and a diabetes management program, as well as other programs and benefits. In 2019, we launched several new efforts to promote the mental and physical health of our employees, including our new myWellness platform, which allows employees to set their physical and mental wellness goals, find top-rated doctors in their area, review information about a new diagnosis or treatment, track healthy habits, challenge colleagues to health competitions, get discounts and more.
At Travelers, diversity and inclusion is a business imperative. Diverse experiences and viewpoints yield greater insights and better outcomes, enable new ideas and spark innovation, raise the bar on individual and team performance, and sharpen our focus on our customers. That is why we are creating a pipeline of diverse candidates and providing learning and development opportunities to advance diverse leaders. We are committed to fostering a welcoming work environment and a culture in which all employees feel valued, respected and supported.
In 2019, to further our commitment to diversity and inclusion, we grew our eight Diversity Networks to more than 11,500 members – more than a third of our employee base. Many employees have joined multiple networks, which total more than 23,500 memberships. These voluntary groups are dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment, as well as the engagement, retention, development and success of all our employees.
Our Diversity Speaks series, which is designed to cultivate a work environment that embraces the power of difference through speaker-led discussions, held five events in 2019. We also hosted approximately 2,500 women agents and employees at SHE TravelsSM events. SHE Travels is our initiative to be the leading advocate for women in insurance. The program seeks to raise awareness of insurance as a fantastic career opportunity, promote professional development and facilitate effective networking and mentoring for women in the industry.
We continue to partner with local nonprofits, such as Viability and Lifeworks, to provide employment opportunities for people with disabilities. According to our employees, these programs can be life changing. Our relationship with these nonprofits also gives us access to previously untapped sources of employee talent, helping us meet our business needs in an efficient and effective manner while fulfilling a crucial need in our communities. In 2019, Lifeworks recognized Travelers with its Employer of the Year award.
Equitable Compensation Practices
Preparation for Retirement
Health and Wellness
Diversity and Inclusion
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