Mutual of Omaha gets IT, business operations on the same page

Mutual of Omaha gets IT, business operations on same page

Mutual of Omaha headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska

Digital Insurance spoke with Brian Poppe, senior vice president for technology modernization at Mutual of Omaha. Poppe has served in this role for two and a half years, and worked at the company for 13 years in all, in roles including product development, enterprise risk management and innovation. Poppe spoke about how modernizing technology at the company meant getting IT and business departments to work together, as with its dental insurance eligibility portal.

How was your current role defined and how are you carrying it out?

Brian Poppe, senior vice president, technology modernization, Mutual of Omaha — Brian Poppe, senior vice president for technology modernization, Mutual of Omaha

It’s the bridge between business strategy and IT strategy. I nudge both sides. ‘Hey, business, you might think about using technology in this particular way.’ Similarly on the IT side, ‘Hey, IT, business wants to do these things. They don't particularly care about these other things. So you might try and focus your efforts here rather than over there.’ Then try to make sure that we're all moving in the right direction with regard to how we're handling technology.

I think about being able to do that influence on both sides. We've come up with better ways of running pilots, for example, with startup companies, to build customer experiences that we want. We've done a better job of building developer-friendly type platforms, whether that is a data platform or truly a developer platform. We're moving things in the right direction. Part of it just takes time, part of it is educating myself and the teams that I work with, and part of it is getting the culture right.

We can look at how others have built their tech stack or done customer experiences, borrow some ideas from them and build our own version of that. It's been a good road for the last two and a half years or so, to making some progress towards modernizing our technology.

When you started, were there a lot of out of date systems to dismantle, and what new operations and new technologies did you bring in?

Before my current role, I spent two years in an innovation role, building a network of people in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, New York, St. Louis, Chicago and so on. In one instance, I got most of the components of a policy life cycle that could be built by startups. I took our CTO to meet them over a couple of days, to get as close to an end-to-end insurance policy as we could. Our CTO put people on it, over three to four months, to run a proof of concept and execute it by stringing together seven or eight different companies and building a model of that insurance policy in a real world fashion. They emulated what they would normally do in day-to-day work and concluded they could really build it. Fast forward a couple years, we built a policy and started selling it on a new cloud-based platform that's become the future of where we want to go from a technology standpoint.

Telling that success story helps set the vision for the other business units that haven't yet started to adopt that. We can say when we think certain things are reusable for their business units. That's probably been one of the more fun and rewarding things in my career here at Mutual of Omaha, seeing that come to fruition.

What do customers or policyholders now see in place as a result of everything you did in the innovation role and in this role?

One of the neat features of our platform, in addition to being much more real-time, is in the application process. One of the things we put in is an application that can be filled out in many ways. A customer may start it on their own. We have the ability to bring in an advisor to help them finish out that application. When the customer gets to the health questions they may say they need some help and want to talk to an advisor, but then we start asking personal health history questions. A customer is not always comfortable filling that out with somebody that they just met. So we now can split that apart again, so you can bring an advisor in and then eventually kick them out. The customer can fill out the health history and bring it back together. We can do the underwriting and issue the policy.

Another example – we had built a secure policy delivery mechanism right before COVID. When March 2020 came around, we didn’t have a great way to print and mail policies. We quickly were able to reuse that secure policy delivery digitally for our customers just by repurposing that exact same capability that we built on that new platform for many of the other products that we've got in place. Nearly all of the products that we have at Mutual of Omaha use that messaging portal now to be able to send policies to our customers digitally.

In December, Mutual of Omaha launched its portal for dental insurance eligibility. What was the process to develop that like?

Initiatives like that come up through each of our business units. We've got IT folks who are working to enable each of the business units, with a centralized team that works on making the platform easier to use and managing the infrastructure we have in place. The business teams and the IT teams can see the problems from each other’s sides. I understand why we would want a dental eligibility piece to make it easier for customers to be able to purchase dental insurance from us. I can see directly the business impact that that has as well as the customer impact.

It’s better for IT to not just be handed a requirements sheet, but to actually deeply understand that customer problem. Similarly, the business teams get a better understanding now of why it’s important to fill out the data in a certain way. Those two pieces can fit together in building the customer experience that we want.

This dental insurance issue was one that emerged as a gap in the market that we didn’t necessarily have a great way to solve. So we set out to build a customer experience that fits more with how we want them to be able to purchase. First, focusing a team on building it, and then giving them the development teams, the supporting technology to ultimately be able to execute it.

What was needed for Mutual of Omaha to be comfortable with cloud services technology?

That's been a long road, as you might imagine. We are a relatively risk averse company and that's served us extremely well for 110-plus years. That risk aversion comes from not only the financial risk that you might imagine in investments or underwriting selection but even from the legal risk. We have people who have come from other places who are very good at understanding cloud services and the legal risks associated with those. We have a good privacy team in place to make sure we're not running afoul of anything from a privacy or even a HIPAA standpoint. We've thought about all those pieces. We may have done a slightly better job of building security in the cloud because we thought about it from an internet security protocol first.

We hadn’t thought about how someone might be able to access our legacy systems from the internet. We had made choices that might not have been made if it had been done with cloud security in mind. We’ve been an Amazon Web Services partner since 2016. Their call center was probably the first big production thing that we put in place. We converted all of our call centers to the AWS platform at the end of 2019. When March 2020 rolled around and COVID began, we were ready to go. We had allowed everyone working at a call center to work from home. If we had a hard line on coming into the office, like we did just a year earlier, that would've been really tough to do. But thankfully, we'd converted all of our main call centers. From there, it's expanded in how we're doing development.

What do you think we will see in the future as far as what technology can do in insurance?

One of the most important things that technology can do for insurance is lower the barrier for experimentation. You may have a great idea that you want to try and figure out a way to test with customers, but it's going to take nine to 12 months and cost $2 million. Technology can either reduce that cost or find out if it’s a good idea or not. Having flexibility in technology allows for more customer-focused thinking. One of the most important things technology can do is to lower that barrier for innovation or experimentation.

In property and casualty, machine learning has grabbed a lot of attention. Most carriers offer something like a progressive snapshot device giving constant near-real-time feedback on a customer’s driving. They’re clearly using machine learning to solve that.

Technology puts us in a position to find and figure out market trends, to answer how to use them to better serve customers, protect what families care about and help them achieve their financial goals. That's Mutual of Omaha's mission.