Travelers: The Transformation Imperative - Succeeding Today, Reshaping Tomorrow | Mojgan Lefebvre

Good morning. So today I wanna take you on a journey, a journey of transformation, innovation, and resilience. This is the story of Travelers. A company with a rich history, a bold vision, and it's driven by our unwavering commitment to excellence in an industry that's defined by constant change. But let me begin with a personal story that embodies the spirits of change. Born in Iran, I spent my childhood in Russia and Israel following my father's job assignments, and I completed my high school education in Iran. With an international background I was keenly aware of the vast array of opportunities, especially for women, that existed outside my country. So I left Iran at 19 with just a few dollars to pursue the American Dream. Today as the Chief Technology and Operations Officer at Travelers, I am honored to share with you how we've embraced constant change to serve better our customers, distribution partners, and employees. With a computer science degree from Georgia Tech and an MBA from Harvard, I've had the privilege of leadership positions at Liberty Mutual, Bain & Company, and software startups, including my own IT consulting firm. These roles focused on strategy, M&A, and technology, have shaped how I approach transformation at the intersection of business and technology. Over the past six years at Travelers, I've focused on leveraging technology and my business acumen to create a product-minded, innovative and agile organization, rooted in engineering excellence. With responsibility for both technology and business operations, I'm thrilled with the opportunity to leverage technology in my own operations team, experiencing firsthand its impact on customer service and productivity. I'm proud to lead one of the top technology and operations teams, a winner of multiple Gartner Eye on Innovation and CIO 100 awards for digital and AI capabilities. It's been an incredible journey and I'm excited to share more with you.

Founded in 1864, and yes, we're one of the ones that are older than 100 years, Travelers has been a pioneer. We issued the first auto insurance policy in 1897, the first aviation policy in 1919, and we insured the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. And since 2019, we've been recognized for our numerous AI and digital innovations, whether assisting with those who've been impacted by wildfire, streamlining claim or underwriting, or combating fraud. With more than 30,000 employees, 15,000 agents and brokers, and 10 million customers across the US, Europe, and Canada, we generated 41 billion in revenues in 2023. We're the only property and casualty company listed in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. So as you can see, innovation is at the heart of everything that we do from being the first to leverage computers for underwriting in the 1960s, to all the investments that we're making today in emerging technologies; we've always evolved to meet our customers' needs. When our CEO Alan Schnitzer joined us in 2015, he put in place what we've called our Perform and Transform Imperative. Perform ensures that we deliver today and transform makes sure that we're ready for tomorrow, but both depend on one thing. The Traveler's promise, our commitment to excellence in all that we do.

In today's world, as we know, technology drives everything from back-office operations, all the way to customer interactions. But to succeed, clear objectives and key results, or as we call them, OKRs, are essential to building any solution, any technology solution. And at Travelers, we have worked hard and hand in hand with our stakeholders to make sure that we're designing strategic solutions that drive real business outcomes. Our transformation is based on four key tenets, delivering great experiences and platforms to our employees, customers, and partners; unlocking the power of data AI and analytics in order to give real-time insights and guide next best actions; upskilling and reskilling our people while enhancing our infrastructure through reusable platforms and services; and last but certainly not least, protecting Travelers with a cloud-first approach, accelerating cloud adoption while scaling securely.

Our tech and ops professionals live and work by the mantra of 'common as possible, but unique as necessary.' And this mindset ensures speed, reduces complexity, and fosters innovation. We also shifted from a project-based approach to a product-based model, organizing our teams around Agile, cross-functional product teams that are aligned with strategic outcomes. This alignment combined with early stakeholder engagement and continuous feedback enables our teams to stay focused on delivering real business value. We've worked hard to make sure that our teams, and as importantly, our business, understands the concept of a digital product or platform. Once the first release is in the hands of the users, Diego, I'm using the word that I'm not supposed to or I should actually say, no, it was John Mullin, sorry. So we, once you put the product or the platform in the hands of the users, it's just the beginning. Our goal really is to build persistent platforms that last and that continue to evolve with user needs. And the cloud enables this beautifully, really reducing or even eliminating, if you are on the last or the one before release, the risk of technical debt. So agility, a product mindset, and customer centricity are key. It helps us empower our teams to act autonomously while they're staying aligned to the strategic OKRs that we've put in place. I often say to my team, 'in any transformation, technology is the easy part.' And companies like Guidewire are making that easier and easier. However, it's really the human elements, it's the change management, the alignment with the stakeholders, the continuous communication, those are what define success. Do the ones for whom you're building the tools, understand what's in it for them? What's their benefit? Do you have key champions from the end-user community embedded in the teams that are actually building the products?

Our transformation has also included a deep collaboration with Guidewire. So my previous roles had familiarized me with Guidewire's ClaimCenter and BillingCenter, but Travelers was actually my first experience with PolicyCenter, first on-prem and then in the cloud. We initially partnered with Guidewire several years ago, and we took a very measured approach to our implementation. We wanted to start when and where we were business ready. The goal was not to change every single policy admin system that we had across Travelers. Rather, it was to focus on product on policy administration, replatforming, where it would drive a clear business outcome, and where we were actually ready to also introduce new products. At the time, PolicyCenter Cloud was not available. However, we decided that we were going to put the on-prem version on AWS as infrastructure, as a service or IaaS. We wanted to do this just to give our teams the opportunity to work in the cloud and to provide them with, as much as possible, future-ready skills. Certainly we knew that we weren't getting advantage from having a SaaS solution because that's not what it was, but I do think that was really a great decision on our part. Having said that, there are absolutely other things that I think we could have done differently. So let me explain what I mean. Once we actually implemented Guidewire for our commercial business in Canada, we were ready to move on to the personal business in Canada. This would've been the perfect time for us to actually adopt PolicyCenter Cloud. It had been in the market for a while, but the perceived risk of doing that just held us back. In hindsight, I think I would've told myself that I should have pushed more for cloud adoption. The risk of waiting really overshadows and over weighs the comfort of sticking with the legacy systems because we know that we have to make that change anyhow. Since then, though, we've carried forward our learnings from this experience into our implementations in the US and we've made sure that we continue to make business-driven decisions about when and where to modernize platforms. However, now we do it on the cloud.

One recent great success that we've had with that is our go-live of Quantum Boat 2.0 in the US, a cutting edge quote and issue platform for specialty insurance. Quantum Boat 2.0 was designed to improve segmentation and underwriting, attract boat owners with competitive rates to a range of watercraft, and provide a streamlined experience for both agents and customers, but as well our operations professionals and underwriters. The initiative actually reflects our end-to-end approach where we've aligned product, process, and technology to deliver a seamless experience. You're actually going to be able to hear more about this later today at 3:45, where a couple of our team members are going to talk more about this detailed implementation. We also leveraged Guidewire's Advanced Product Designer or APD, which allowed us to define and visualize product configurations in real time with our business before having to write a line of code or configure anything. This capability gave us the flexibility to test and learn in ways that weren't really possible before APD, ensuring that we could quickly adapt products to evolving market needs. And we tried in our implementation to stay as close as possible to out-of-the-box capabilities without losing any critical capabilities, of course. So only where it was to our competitive advantage did we go to doing more complex configurations or if necessary customization. This approach allowed us to really maintain a consistent high-end experience because what we decided to do was actually implement the platform as a headless platform. We wanted to maintain our user interface, which is award-winning, and we consider it a competitive advantage. And so while we implemented that and maintained the experience, we were still taking advantage of all of the capabilities that Guidewire provided us. So by embracing these modern platforms, practices, we've been able to automate repetitive processes, streamline product offerings, and enhance omnichannel engagement all while building on a common cloud-based platform to ensure scalability and agility. Guidewire is an important strategic partner to us and so are our implementation partners. Our close collaboration with all of them have really ensured that we are having seamless integrations, we're driving scalability, and we're aligning with the product roadmap, keeping us ahead of industry changes. You heard earlier from Christina Colby how important it is to be truly engaged in the Guidewire ecosystem, and I couldn't underline that enough. And Guidewire has taken many of what were our needs, and were not already in the product, actually into account as they've designed their strategic product roadmaps, another testament to the deep and strategic partnership that we have with them.

So to summarize, the key elements of our success have been defining clear objectives, early and comprehensive stakeholder engagement, holistic integration planning for both upstream and downstream systems, reimagining processes to favor simple configuration over complex configuration or customization, change management, and of course, strategic vendor partnerships. Our transformation is a journey of embracing change, leveraging technology, and staying true to our spirit of innovation. But if there is one takeaway from our conversation, it would be that if you haven't already done so, come to the second 50th percentile. As Mike said, 'Get started on your Guidewire Cloud journey now.' And I truly mean that. The faster and the earlier you move, the more you'll unlock the potential of modern platforms like Guidewire, to drive growth and innovation. Thank you for joining me today. I hope you leave inspired by our journey and excited about the possibilities that lie ahead.