Spotlight on Women in Insurance Leadership 2023 honorees
January 24, 2024 6:43 AM
Launching advanced AI projects, leaning into her career: AmFam's Bethany Jansen
Bethany Jansen, strategic technology program manager at American Family Insurance and one of Digital Insurance's Women in Insurance Leadership: Next honorees, has been helping her company adopt advanced artificial intelligence everywhere it makes sense.
Jansen's team developed a large language model that she brought to the sales insight and analytics team, a group of 36 analysts with different specialties, like profit and growth, agency reporting and Tableau dashboard tools.
"Within all of that, there's 413 tables in which any of this data can exist," Jansen said in an interview. "And when people leave their position, some of that institutional knowledge is lost. So utilizing the LLM to recall where that data is stored when they're viewing a certain report is helpful."
Chubb's Camila Serna is writing the future of embedded insurance
Chubb's digital business has expanded to nearly 200 digital platforms and financial institutions, with more than 20 million digital policies and access to 375 million customers. In 2022, Chubb's digital business produced about $500 million in gross premiums through digital platforms with an underwriting profit. Serna sees more room for growth and this is just one of the reasons why she was selected by Digital Insurance as a 2023 Women in Insurance Leadership honoree.
"We believe that there is a great opportunity yet to be tapped in the embedded insurance space across several key verticals, including fintech, e-commerce, mobility and gig platforms," Serna says. For example, Chubb partnered with a Grab — a ride-hailing, food-delivery and payment app in Southeast Asia — to provide gig-worker and individual consumer insurance. Through a partnership with Nubank in Latin America, Chubb embedded term life insurance in the digital bank's app. "For every geography, there have been examples of partnerships like that where we've done app-based distribution of seamless, contextual, simplified insurance coverage that matches up with whatever transaction a consumer is doing in an app," she says.
Arch Insurance's Valerie Turpin leverages predictive models in underwriting
As chief underwriting officer for property at Arch Insurance, Valerie Turpin looks at predictive models to determine risks for underwriting coverage against hurricane losses.
The commercial property coverage Turpin works with has implications for other areas of insureds' business, such as lending. "My job is mostly focusing on managing the capital allocation, managing the acceptable level of exposure for the company and giving some direction about where the company wants to go for this line of product," she said.
Turpin has been in her role at Arch for five years and in the U.S. insurance industry for 13 years, including six years at AIG. She began her career as a loss prevention engineer in Paris, which led her into underwriting as an insurance career there before relocating to the U.S.
WIL Next: Vuarnet Alonzo
"Risk-taking is not a skill you learn, it's a choice you make."
This sentiment, which comes from a statement by Tinder founding team member Rosette Pambakian in a Forbes article, has become one of Vuarnet Alonzo's favorite pieces of advice and the embodiment of her career journey with CSAA Insurance Group.
Alonzo, CSAA's director of client services, says that being a risk-taker has led her to new opportunities she never could have anticipated. In 2014, Alonzo was one of the first hired into a brand-new pilot department at CSAA, where she worked as a medical payments adjuster. As pioneers of the department, Alonzo and her team established the groundwork for its necessary processes and created training materials as they navigated their new roles.
"People say my niche is doing brand new things here," says Alonzo. "I learned it all pretty quickly, even though it was new to me at the time. I think that good timing is what allows people to really step up, even if they're brand new, to help mold the role."