Deepa Soni is CIO of The Hartford. She spoke to Digital Insurance in July 2021. Following is an edited transcript of that conversation.
Digital Insurance: How did you come to work at The Hartford?
Deepa Soni: I am an engineer by education. The first half of my career was in software development, building business applications and leading software development teams. The last 15 years, I've been in executive roles, I would say largely at the intersection of business and technology. I grew up in the banking industry. And I led various groups within technology there. I also have had the opportunity to partner with businesses in leading digital transformation, helping businesses leverage technology, data analytics to various roles. I was head of application development CIO in my previous role, and then I had a good experience leading company wide reengineering, with a reimagining of the end to end business. Insurance is similar to banking in many ways, but also different in some ways. So, it's given me the challenge of learning the insurance industry and I'm on that journey to learn the insurance industry right now.
DI: What are your responsibilities, and how will they change following the
Deepa Soni: Now I lead all of technology across the company, which includes lines of business, infrastructure, architecture, analytics, data science and information security. We are bringing all these capabilities together.
DI: What are some of your plans in the near term?
Deepa Soni: You've probably heard our CEO say that Hartford over the past several years has pursued a very aggressive technology agenda. We've been expanding our digital capabilities by processes, platforms, and really applying data to enhance a product. For the past 18 months specifically, I’ve worked to elevate the role technology's playing, and we plan to continue the great momentum that we have in the organization to bring agile practices, cloud-led digital platforms, automation, advanced data and analytics, and data science to our businesses. We'll continue the momentum we have.
DI: What are some of your strategies to improve the customer experience for The Hartford?
Deepa Soni: I would say a very large part of our technology investments is focused on digitizing and digitally enabling customer experiences, and also enabling our employees visually to be able to serve our customers better. So, you see a common theme of what I call a "digital in digitization," which is not just automating current processes but also taking the time to reimagine the end to end customer experiences. And, of course, keeping the customer at the front of it, I would say the company is very squarely focused on it and technology. A large part of technology investments are being leveraged for that.
DI: How did the switch to remote last year affect workplace culture? Do you think the lessons learned when remote will be useful when you return to the office?
Deepa Soni: The pandemic really helped us further think about how we take care of our employees’ mental well-being, an ongoing concern, but one that the pandemic amplified at our company as well as others throughout the U.S. So Hartford as a company, and we in technology, have become more receptive towards employees’ balancing -- overall work flexibility has increased by many magnitudes I would say. We have to be more flexible to make sure that our employees contribute, when they have the flexibility to contribute. We're more receptive to hybrid arrangements. We're more receptive to looking at the well-being of our employees. So, I think some of these things are going to stay with us for some time to come more hybrid workforce.
DI: I've seen and heard you talk about before the importance of being a mentor and sponsor to women in male-dominated fields. How are you working to change that in insurance technology?
Deepa Soni: We actually have a very strong women and technology program. And one aspect of that program is picking and choosing our top middle management women. And we have senior men and women sponsoring them so they can open up doors for these women that they'd probably not be able to see by themselves. It's reverse mentoring, as well, where our female leaders are becoming acquainted with the challenges of diverse candidates and our diverse candidates are really getting a push of visibility, a sponsorship from senior leaders in the company.
DI: Looking at the year of 2021, in regards to engineering and technology, could you tell me what you've accomplished so far this year, and what you're looking to accomplish the second half of the year?
Deepa Soni: In 2020, we started our journey towards modern technologies, scaling agile cloud, and isolating our data and data science capabilities. And we knew we would have to help our teams modernize this skill, to take this journey to the next level. So this year, we've deemed ourselves as the year of engineering and technology. We're investing heavily in our employees giving them the time to get trained and certified. Teams are energized about the opportunity to work in leading edge technology. And we are equally excited, I would say, by the fantastic business relationships; we have an ability to make a direct impact on the business. So I would say all in all, if you're in technology, Hartford is really an exciting place to be.
