Jane Possell is Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer for CNA, responsible for all aspects of the company’s technology portfolio.

Jane joined CNA in 2019 from Liberty Mutual where she served in a variety of roles, both in business and technology areas. She was most recently responsible for all Small Commercial and Personal Lines Digital Technology. Prior to that, Jane spent more than 20 years at Accenture working with 20 of the top 25 U.S. Property & Casualty insurers. As a Managing Director for Accenture, Jane led account teams of up to 750 responsible for identifying, shaping and delivering client solutions, while building internal capabilities for Accenture.

Jane has extensive experience leading global teams and building and executing Diversity & Inclusion strategies. She is passionate about developing leaders and teams that co-create high-quality organizational cultures and use the power of diversity to drive business results.

Jane holds dual degrees in Finance and Communications from University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She is also a graduate of the Leadership Development Program from the IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Notes from the episode

• Consolidation of distribution players across the board
• Insurance exchange platforms (Bold Penguin, Insureon, etc)
  • Everyone rushed to integrate with them, especially on small commercial
  • In the last 12-18 months, we’ve seen a rush of acquiring them (Aon buys CoverWallet, AmFam buys Bold Penguin)
• Seeing some of the distribution players buying innovation companies to ostensibly build a new platform to distribute their products differently
• This all leads us to question how we’ve sold, prospected, etc, and what will change here.
• How will AI going to play into the lead gen space, and especially moving beyond personal lines
• Blockchain as a way to distribute data, but retain control
  • Initial use cases seem to be focused on the regulatory area as a way to get the data into the places that require it, but allow carriers to retain  control of the data
  • Increased awareness of and focus on security means the additional control you can retain is really attractive
• Blockchain can become a natural extension of internal data and analytics work that’s gone on because it’s a way to share data, so it can bolster what your analytics can do
• When will we move from building solutions to putting them together (by aggregating all the best-of-breed point solutions available)?
• The Cloud enables democratizing data so you can do more with it in more places, and to do so relatively inexpensively
• Using outcomes to anchor technology investments
• Focus on business agility and flexibility more so than just speed when looking at Agile
  • Focusing on outcomes rather than replacing a system
• Jane’s advice to CIOs is to make the Technology organization in a company part of the business fabric, being curious and interested

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.

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