Beth Riczko is president of personal lines at Nationwide and was a Digital Insurance Women in Insurance Leadership honoree in 2016.
DI: Can you tell me about your career path up to Nationwide -- where else have you worked and what positions have you held?
Riczko: I have a pretty broad background that ranges from actuarial analytic roles to operational roles. I've been with Nationwide for about two and a half years. I came into the organization and served in our enterprise risk management area, and then moved on to serve as our P&C CFO, and have been in the position of president of personal lines since last December. Prior to that, I had ten years with Westfield Insurance in a variety of roles, from actuarial to analytics, underwriting and product. And before that, I spent two years as an insurance agent. And before that worked for Ohio Casualty, which is now part of Liberty Mutual, as Chief Actuary, CFO and president of insurance operations.
DI: Are there any experiences you feel best prepared you for your current role at Nationwide?
Riczko: I feel like what prepared me is the variety of roles. What I find really valuable now is having a broad perspective of the insurance value chain, and being able to understand how the business operates from multiple angles. It's just enormously valuable. When you're in a senior leader role, your ability to put yourself in the seat of many of the stakeholders that you're working with, and be able to talk to them in the language they're comfortable with, and from the perspective that they have, is really helpful. I give advice to folks who ask me, from a career perspective, “What should I be thinking about?” One of the things I tell them is to look at change as a positive. Anytime you can step into a role where you see an opportunity to bring something that you've learned from your previous experience and add value, and at the same time, learn new skills -- those are the kinds of moves people should be making to prepare them for leadership.
DI: What are your key responsibilities?
Riczko: I lead our personal lines organization, so [I’m responsible for] almost $9 billion in premium volume for our members. That includes our sales and distribution, our underwriting and product functions, claims, and our service team. I have a dotted-line relationship with our finance and actuarial team. They sit in my cabinet and operate as a member of my team. And, marketing also sits as a dotted-line relationship. So, it is the end-to-end personal lines business for Nationwide: a big, complex business.
DI: What aspects of your formal education have been useful in your career? What kind of things could a formal education not prepare you for?
Riczko: Well, my formal education was very scientific, right? So, I was a physics and math major. I think the power of it is it's a very analytical, data-oriented way of thinking about things. And I joke with folks and say, “The physics was just a constant math word problem.” It sounds really impressive to be a math and physics major, but it's basically like doing math twice. And when you look at what I do, in work, I'm solving word problems every day -- complex, very nuanced word problems, but there's always an element of data and analytics in it. I think what's interesting about my education is it gave me that critical-thinking skill you need. What it did not do is prepare you for the complexity of operating in the real world. So, the world has people and relationships and preferences. Something I love is reading books that deal with behavioral science and human behavior. Connecting the really strong critical thinking skills and the data and analytic skills with an understanding of how we think, how we act and how we make decisions can be really powerful when you think about making choices and leading an organization.
DI: How has the transition to President of Personal Lines been during a pandemic?
Riczko: Absolutely not a problem. Everybody has a different perspective about remote work and how the pandemic has treated them. I stepped into this role right before Christmas. I had planned to take a couple weeks off around the holidays. It was a perfect time to transition because it was pretty quiet in the office. And, so, I had this two-week period where I was able to start the onboarding process, reading a ton of material, talking to my team members and consuming a lot of content. There's sort of this mood inside the organization when you get back right after January, like, “Alright, we're ready to go.” I felt readier than I would have been had I jumped on day one into my first meeting.
I love the option of work from home. I love the fact that we have offered it to our associates. I find, for me, because I'm an introvert, that building relationships is actually easier with the tools we have now. I have ready access to anybody within the Nationwide enterprise through chat, which made the onboarding easier. And then, honestly, what helped me was I was part of the P&C team before this transition. So, my peer set and the team that I'm working with -- while I'm learning about the personal lines team and that was new -- a lot of the peers are the same, which really helped the onboarding process.
DI: Do you think remote work affected your leadership style? Are there any changes brought by remote work that you want to maintain?
Riczko: I think the one thing that remote work has done for me is that I'm more conscious now of what I would call the “remote relationships” in the office -- people that you don't interact with but they're part of your network. When you're in the office, those are the folks you run into in the cafeteria, the hallway, or the elevator, and we don't have those [working remotely]. These “casual collisions” are not happening. So, a change that I’ve made is to block a small amount of time on my calendar every month that is just outreach time. In that time, I'm thinking about the people that I would have historically bounced into somewhere -- a really long list of folks that I'm going to use this time to chat with, to see if they're available for a quick call.
DI: What did you learn from operating your own insurance agency?
Riczko: I learned that until you sit in the seat of the agent, you really don't know what it's like to be an agent. It humbled me to understand how important it is that we listen to our agents. That is the God's honest truth. Before I became an agent, I thought I really understood our agency partners, what they needed, and how they thought. And at a macro level, I did. But the devil’s in the details. When I became an agent, I realized what these little pebbles that we create for our agency partners that create friction in the system and make it hard to do business with companies are. Coming back on the company side, there was an opportunity to remind people that while it's great for us to have a hypothesis about what we think our agency partners want, you don't want to take action until you're actually talking to the agents and you really understand how they operate. Because our assumptions are often close, but not exactly on point for how they think about and run their business.
DI: Are there any digital advances this year that you are looking forward to?
Riczko: In our space, I'm super excited about our telematics capabilities. Nationwide, has two telematics solutions, SmartRide and SmartMiles, and I am a fairly new customer to both of them, and I'm loving the experience. On our SmartRide product, you get an initial discount, drive for a while and then get your final discount. My husband and I had a competition to see who was going to get the bigger discount. I think they're products that not only help us compete effectively, I love the fact that it creates the interaction element with the customer. And they're giving back a little bit of control to the customer from a price perspective. Frankly, it's really cool. And the technology is amazing.
DI: At the 2018 Dig In conference, you gave a talk on being an “authentic woman” at work. How do you think that concept has continued to evolve?
Riczko: Well, I think one of the observations I would make from 2018 to now is, at least with Nationwide, and I suspect this is true beyond the four walls of Nationwide: I think there's more openness to having some of the difficult conversations around diversity, equity and inclusion. It's race, gender, sexual orientation -- how you think about yourself from a diversity and inclusion perspective. I think there's more dialogue and energy now than there's ever been. And, it's one of the things I'm really proud about -- the fact that Nationwide is spending a lot of time, not only talking about this, but holding leaders accountable for their behavior: how we recruit, how we think about promoting women into leadership positions. I feel like the energy is there now to not just have the conversation, but to have an impactful outcome and actually make gains. I think there's more openness to acknowledging that we have to work at this seriously.
DI: Do you have any advice for women in the insurance industry beginning their careers?
Riczko: There's a lot of times still, in a lot of settings, where you walk in the room, as a woman, and you are the minority. Statistics tell us that, and whether it's this or for some other reason, if you feel like you're outnumbered in the space you're in, there is a tendency for [women] to be quiet, to not speak, to not participate. And I really encourage women: don't speak just for the sake of speaking. but be engaged in the conversation. Simply put, have courage. I look at career-defining moments where somebody saw me step into a difficult conversation and be respectful, but very honest and very candid at the same time. And those moments honestly have shaped my career, they have opened up doors that wouldn't have been open, had I taken the purely safe route of not speaking up. And, I tell young women this all the time: You have to find your voice. That doesn't mean you speak in every setting, doesn't mean you dominate the conversation. It's first to listen, but contribute and be brave, and step into difficult conversations with courage and an openness to hear another person's point of view. And if you do that, I think you get recognized for your ability to lead and build relationships and build rapport.
DI: What changes are you hoping for women in the insurance industry?
Riczko: I hope we stop being seen as women. I don't want the gender to be the first thing people see in us. What I want is the first thing that people see in anybody, I don't care who they are, is the strengths they bring to the table. Stop putting people in boxes if we can solve for that, and women are seen first for their strengths, not for their gender. That is the moment where we've really made great strides.
