Selective Appoints New CIO

Selective Insurance Group Inc. today announced the appointment of Ronald St. Clair as EVP, CIO. St. Clair will assume the responsibilities of Richard Connell, who retired on April 1, 2011.

"We are very excited to have Ron on the executive leadership team at Selective," says Chairman, President and CEO Gregory Murphy. "He brings extensive information technology experience to Selective that will surely spark innovation and further our mission to be the 'high-tech, high-touch' provider of property and casualty insurance."

St. Clair spent the past 14 years at The Progressive Corp., most recently as IT executive leading the Enterprise Resource Organization. He also held senior positions in the Commercial Auto and eServicing organizations. His achievements included leading the team that built Progressive's website; developing the IT strategy and governance to drive faster time-to-market of new commercial auto product ideas; and moving insurance policy service transactions to a self-service Web portal for independent agents.

Prior to Progressive, St. Clair was the director of technology at Jo-Ann Stores Inc., formerly Fabri-Centers of America Inc. In this role, he created the technology vision for the company and built its client/server architecture from scratch to support its data warehousing initiative. He also spent the first six years of his career at Accenture, formerly Andersen Consulting, working with manufacturing, distribution, retail and health care clients.