Greater New York Mutual CIO transforms insurer's data handling

December 18, 2023 6:55 AM

GNY Insurance Cos - 200 Madison NY HQ.jpg — GNY Insurance Companies is headquartered at 200 Madison Avenue in New York.

Vasudevan Veeraraghavan, CIO of GNY (Greater New York Mutual) Insurance Companies, has more than 20 years experience with technology in the insurance industry, starting his career working with mainframe computers. He's seen the transformation of insurtech firsthand and believes in managing these changes as an evolution. Veeraraghavan was previously director of financial services at Capgemini, during which he worked extensively with Chubb. He joined GNY in September 2022. Digital Insurance spoke with Veeraraghavan about how managing data is key to successfully transforming a carrier's technology.

What does digital transformation in insurance mean to you, when you first engaged with the idea and today?

Vasudevan Veeraraghavan of GNY Insurance Companies — Vasudevan Veeraraghavan, CIO of GNY (Greater New York Mutual) Insurance Companies.

When I first engaged with it about 10, 11, 12 years ago, it was about getting out of green screens and mainframes, platforms that had been the core of running the business since the 1960s. It started off as moving away from legacy green screen platforms onto database oriented platforms.

But now transformation is no longer a five year, seven year kind of thing. Because if you do that, you are already outdated. If you try to work on a transformation that takes five years to really do something, you're already legacy at that point. Now technology is not just an enabler, it is actually the means in which people are doing business. Now the technology is pretty agile. The way to do transformation is to plan for six months or one year and get it in the hands of your customers so that they start using it. You gather feedback, you improvise on it, you enhance on it. It's an ongoing evolution.

What's your vision of digital transformation for Greater New York Mutual?

A lot of it is data-driven. The wealth of information we have, for a lot of decision making that we do as an organization, we really want to rely on data. There is heavy focus in internalizing the data we have within the organization as well as how to get data from the outside world that will help make better decisions.

The second focus is since there is so much data available, there's a lot of things out there. It's how to bring all of them at the right time to my underwriters, so they could make decisions faster. It's more of an API ecosystem.

Those are the two core tenets in which we can propel the business. We can help augment, we can bring that efficiency, we can bring good decision making, data driven decision making. The objective is speed to market, superior customer experience, operational efficiency, getting more insights in data and digital governance.

What are the biggest challenges that P&C insurers have for getting the most out of technology now?

There's a spectrum. For personal lines, it's reaching customers through social platforms, who want ease of use. Everyone is using gadgets. We buy everything online. The big challenge is attracting the younger generation with that experience.

In commercial lines, technology can bring that kind of experience, but it's not for the insurer as the end user. Here the user is brokers or agents. Because agents don't write policies, when somebody goes to an agent and tries to get a quote, they're not writing the quote for one insurance carrier. They're probably writing it for multiple carriers.

The competition is how to offer a better product and give that experience with the limited data that an agent can provide you. Data is everywhere, but how readable is it? There is the technology to bring the data, but the credibility of the data, the authentication of the data and how are you getting some of these insights into the hands of decision making. Those are still some of the challenges that P&C insurance companies face.

What role will artificial intelligence or Gen AI play for insurance?

At ITC Vegas, there was no topic that didn't have an aspect of AI in it. The question was, is it really hype? Or is it real? It is coming at us faster than we can think of. At GNY, as part of our transformation or evolution, we already have started looking at generative AI. In machine learning, you really think about how to bring in structured or unstructured data.

You can do machine learning, you can do that simple model but as you go beyond a structured construct, you need Gen AI, and we are starting to do that. Gen AI [and] data -- they go hand in hand with regards to getting the correct information at the right time. There are use cases that we are looking at from an underwriting standpoint and eventually there will be on the claims side but Gen AI is going to be there. We are starting to get some of it into our processes, in our technology, where we could help.

How do you think about climate risk models or claims as such losses increase?

The core of our underwriting is driven by perils that affect our industry, like earthquakes, hurricanes and these catastrophes that happen. Even our pricing is driven by that, or reinsurance is driven by that. If you really think about where this technology comes into play, there are a lot of really, really good providers that really work on all this catastrophe modeling, the scoring of risk based upon geography, based upon various hazards, if you're closer to the coast or if you're near a wildfire area.

Applying that through technology, most of it is API driven. We're building that API ecosystem, where you if you give me an address or a property, I can get the last 20 years of information about the weather, the catastrophes, the surrounding area and the risk parameters, and bring all those to bear when I'm making a decision or when I'm pricing something. The climate impact is real. Over the past few years, claims have been higher. We need to put technology in place to evaluate and mitigate this.

How is GNY and the industry applying cloud computing technology?

You get the power of community by no longer having each organization manage their own infrastructure. Nobody builds core platforms from scratch. We all look for products and offerings that are available in the market and most of it is moving towards cloud. The power of community comes from a lot of use cases others are trying to solve, which you can get benefit out of. Moving towards cloud is something that's happening. It is something that you have to onboard. Otherwise you will be left out. Big players are also trying to move towards cloud. After a few years if you don't catch up, you probably no longer have the support from them. Or you're out from the competition.

We just started in 2023. There's two aspects to it. One, we are building our own API's and we are a Microsoft shop. So a lot of our API ecosystem is built around Azure. The core platforms that we buy and work on sit on AWS cloud. There is a mix of both AWS and Azure at GNY. It is by intent that we are doing that.

We are building data bricks. We are using data bricks. We are building the whole data platform, an enterprise data platform that's going to sit on the cloud. We're trying to build the way we operate. The way we release our technology capability is going to be very MVP-driven, meaning minimum viable product. Technology evolves, and we have to keep evolving with the technology. The team at GNY is headed in that direction.