5 Questions: Paula Bartgis, CIO, Sun Life

May 11, 2022 7:11 AM

Paula Bartgis is SVP and CIO for Sun Life. She joined Sun Life in 2019 from Voya Financial and also held tech roles at Travelers and MassMutual. She spoke to Digital Insurance in May 2022; what follows is a lightly edited transcript of that discussion.

You’ve worked at several insurers and other companies in your career. Coming to Sun Life, what were you looking to impart as the leader of the tech organization?

Paula Bartgis, CIO, Sun Life

We really had to come together as one team with one goal. And that's something I set out from day one with my team when I got here and not only on the tech side, but on the business side. I truly believe this to my core: Anything from a technology perspective is possible. It really is the appetite of the organization in terms of how fast they want to go. I learned a lot about the company, and the culture here is something really special. We're here to serve the business, and if the businesses really want to innovate and they really want to work together, there's a lot of amazing things that we can do collectively. My job is to make sure that we have a strategy that we're grounded on, and that I'm helping to take the business where they want to go.

You started at Sun Life right before the pandemic. How did you go about implementing your near-term plans with so much disruption?

I've been able to achieve everything I've wanted to achieve in the technology organization. It has been a challenge, but it hasn't been a barrier as far as market conditions. We used to go and do enrollments physically. We had to pivot and be able to provide a different kind of digital solution in order to meet the clients where they are. So it's really around thinking about the experiences and, and as part of our digital transformation, we really are approaching this from a client-obsessed standpoint.

In 2018, Sun Life’s acquired benefits administration startup Maxwell Health. How did that dovetail with your vision?

I saw a huge opportunity. [Maxwell] brought not only a technology solution, but also brought people that think differently. It’s the startup culture versus a major insurance company that's been established for over a hundred years. I've deliberately taken that team and infused them. It’s a different approach to doing things and you can learn from both sides. We can bring benefits expertise onto the technology side, and bringing that sort of fresh approach to innovation to the benefits side.

How has the pandemic affected your ability to add staff to meet these goals?

There has been a big change, we now can say we can hire anybody anywhere. And so it really enables us to go after talent in a different way going forward. It's opened up an opportunity for everyone, and I don't think people were as open-minded [about remote work] prior to the pandemic. But it doesn't matter what vision I have, what strategy I have, if we don't have the right people and we don't have people with passion and who are engaged and who care about what we do as a company.

Sun Life is introducing a new platform for its clients. How does that reflect the way the business has been re-oriented around transformation and collaboration?

Sun Life Onboard is basically giving employers guided step-by-step onboarding task prompts, but all digitally. In the future it will become more automated, more customizable, more data driven and so forth. We’re getting an iteration of this out there to familiarize clients with the platform itself and with the process,, and with taking these tasks and making them digitally interactive. There's stages of development, which I think is really great because it gets solutions out to clients faster while we continue improving the experience. It’s that client-obsessed design thinking that Maxwell brought to the table that enabled this as well.