Angie Klett is Senior Vice President of Corporate Development leading Ventures, Mergers & Acquisitions, Strategic Partnerships, and Brokerage Solutions. This set of shared Enterprise competencies focuses on investing in, buying or divesting, and partnering with outside parties to create enterprise value. The team is focused on new ways to acquire customers and partnering to share capabilities, such as data and technology. Corporate Development advances and enhances near term business outcomes while also conducting tests as building blocks into the future.

Previously, Angie served as IT CFO and Chief Procurement Officer (CPO). As CFO, she was a strategic business partner to Jim Fowler, Enterprise Chief Technology Officer, providing financial planning and reporting on the $1B+ IT budget. Since a great deal of technology spend is sourced externally from suppliers, there was a tight link to Angie’s responsibilities as CPO, where she led $4B of strategic sourcing and procurement for Nationwide.

Angie began her career as an accountant in the financial services side of Nationwide. She has spent half her career in the property and casualty business and half in various finance roles. In the property and casualty business, Angie held leadership positions across sales and service centers, marketing, and product management. She has held roles in corporate finance, as well as property and casualty finance.

Angie holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Ohio Wesleyan University, a Chartered Financial Consultant designation, and is a CPA. She currently serves on the governance committee for Berger Ohio Health and holds a seat on the finance committee of Ohio Health.

Highlights from the Show

• Angie is responsible for things in the Build, Buy and Partner side. Corporate Development, which includes M&A, Partnerships and Ventures
• Nationwide has been an early and bold mover on partnering with OEM car makers on connected insurance
• This includes partnerships with Ford, Rivian and others
• Nationwide modernized their core system, moving it to the cloud, allowing them to launch 55 partners on their new platform and the API library they've built on it
  • They have 385 internal APIs and 52 public APIs that allow a partner to go all the way through API
  • Those APIs get over 10 billion pings annually
  • It also allows them to manage things like PCI compliance for payment, or other regulatory considerations that need to be handled at different moments of the process
• When a customer is in the partner journey, the partner brand is front and central, and then once the insurance is in place, Nationwide's brand is central to the insurance experience
• We talked about why a car maker would want to embed insurance, and it's not about the commission or marketing consideration they'd earn, but rather the impact on the customer experience of problems securing insurance or an embedded insurance experience that isn't good enough
• The take rate on the partnerships has been very strong, but the experience and the customer's level of trust in the process dictates the adoption
• The customer will dictate the speed of adoption and what ways of working will prevail, not us, so we need the flexibility to learn from what they want and provide it, adjusting as their desires change
• Retention and cross-sell have also performed better than expected
• Nationwide has explicit learning plans when they partner, and this has allowed them to find new offerings and new products that their openness allows them to see and respond to, like their recent partnership with Assurant on digital coverage verification
• What does embedded mean to agent distribution? Angie says that we need to let customer dictate how they want to transact, and some will definitely want agent help no matter what
  • That means carriers need to support agents as they become more digital so they can support customers as needs evolve and change
• In terms of the future, customers will set the pace and adoption rate, and if we can meet their needs as they arise, that transition will be easier for us
  • But trust will be critical, so we need to meet the true needs as they're really being asked for rather than how we want
• To respond to that means having the flexibility in your platform to respond to each opportunity and have the customization in how you deploy it to meet that specific partnership's needs; if you try to build a new solution each time, you'll find that the economics never work out, but if you lack the ability to really customize efficiently, you'll also fail because you won't meet the market needs

This episode is brought to you by Guidewire Software (guidewire.com). And by the book series, The Future of Insurance: From Disruption to Evolution by Bryan Falchuk (future-of-insurance.com).

Follow the podcast at future-of-insurance.com/podcast for more details and other episodes.

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