Raghav leads the P&C business globally for EXL, including all aspects of strategy and growth, sales and account management, products and solutions, and service delivery for a global workforce of over 9,000 professionals. Since taking over this role in 2018, Raghav has transformed the business to a $250M+ powerhouse and established EXL as the unparalleled leader on the back of an innovative, solution-led go-to-market strategy coupled with an obsessive focus on customer experience and net promoter scores.

Under Raghav’s leadership, EXL P&C Insurance has been ranked consistently as #1 and a Star Performer by research firm Everest in their Global Provider Peak Matrix Rankings in 2020 and 2021. He has expanded the business to 25+ global markets and pivoted the business to be a strategic digital transformation partner to the insurance industry, including 7 of the top 10 US insurers and the largest global broker. He is an active contributor, thought leader and speaker at industry events and conferences.

Prior to his current role, Raghav was the Global Lead Partner for EXL’s strategic accounts and co-head for EXL's Insurance Transformation business. He has extensive experience of implementing and managing strategic client engagements. He is a dynamic leader with over 20 years of experience. Raghav has a Bachelors degree in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, and has attended the Advanced Management Program at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

Highlights from the Show

• Raghav runs the Global Insurance practice for EXL, which he's been with for over 19 years
• EXL is seeing so many changes on the back of the pandemic across so many carriers, by at least three years in Raghav's eyes
• The focus has been on digitization and CX, especially
• Innovation has been held back in the insurance industry for a very long time, with some carriers choosing to create innovative units, and they have been best positioned to change
• 60-70% of the disruption in the industry has been focused on Personal Lines and distribution
• When this can be done as a science rather than an art – more use of tech, of advanced models, in using AI in decision making and processing
• Think about an organization that is hyper-connected with customer experience at its core, without silos between the major functions, product lines and operations that can leverage real-time data and insights, predictive and prescriptive
• As an example from a Workers Compensation claims payment:
  • Can an AI or ML algorithm look across claims that informs loss control when it sees patterns to try to stop those claims from occurring in the future by changing behaviors and practices
  • This insight comes from being hyper-connected at the scale of minute data, in real-time
• This creates fluidity of insurance – we have all of these different insurance policies, but as a customer, we'd really just prefer to have everything embedded in our life providing the right coverage in the right place without worrying about which policy is at play when or how
• The use of data in a seamless fashion will mean the traditional insurance hubs of Hartford or London will see competition from new places like Singapore and Hong Kong, driven by how data is being utilized
• Whether from the inside or outside, to spot where disruption will come from, you have to reimagine Insurance with the customer at the core in a way we have never done before
• Right now, the innovation is happening in small slices, but the money is coming in and data is being utilized in a way that we may get the Uber or Amazon level of disruption that brings about fluidity of insurance
• Soft markets push us to look at efficiency, but also to ensure we align intensity with severity
• With the vision Raghav has for fluidity of insurance, there is no way to make that a reality with any systems or structures today, so it will take totally rethinking the approach to insurance, which may take a push from big tech to enable
• With the constraints the industry faces, this future may be very hard to realize, so we need to be aware of our constraints while thinking about what could be enabled if they were removed
• But these constraints are usually self-imposed, and to customers, the ways we divide the business don't matter; insurance is insurance to them and the divisions we impose between products, Personal and Commercial, Underwriting and Claims, are just annoyances; they just want to be served, and we need to rethink that structure
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This episode is brought to you by EXL (exlservice.com). And by the 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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