Greg Tachhetti is the SVP, Chief Information & Strategy Officer for Columbus-based State Auto. He was an owner and founder of AssureStart, a company that sells small business insurance online, before joining State Auto in 2015. He was chief administrative officer of Fireman's Fund Insurance Company and Allianz of America, and held senior operations, underwriting and finance roles with Safeco and GEICO.

Highlights from the show

Today

• Using data to understand behaviors rather than prediction
• State Auto has committed to a Cloud-based approach and a new data lake to move forward, and will run off their legacy systems and data rather than trying to migrate
• The starting point should be getting the data architecture right first
• Why did they choose Amazon, and there are a few that they've shared that have been transformative
  • They have a customer-centric way of thinking
  • Product team mentality
• Thinking digitally is about thinking about how you consume data, not what paper you can get rid of

The Future

• Insurance is a unique industry - we have ~2,600 companies, and haven't seen a consolidation of 80% in the top few firms (like the Auto, Airline, Banking, etc industries), so will that change?
• Our expense situation as an industry has to change, with 30% going to overhead before we've paid for or to handle a single claim - this is not sustainable and leaves the door open for disruption
• Data has transformed many things around us, so what will happen to carriers at some point when it really transforms us since the real data-based companies are consumer brands (Tesla, Amazon, Facebook, Google), not insurers
• The data is out there, and there are no more constraints on computational power, so what things will this unleash for our industry?
• Ecosystem approach to track and respond to risk specifically - companies working together around a key customer-facing brand to stop the loss rather than just respond to it

Parting Wisdom for the Future

• Getting the right leaders in place with the right mentality about people is really the most important piece of the puzzle

This episode is brought to you by Medallia (Medallia.com), and 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.

Music courtesy of UPbeat Music, available to stream on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Google Play. Just search for "UPbeat Music".