CIO Leadership Live with Mojgan Lefebvre, EVP, Chief Technology & Operations Officer, Travelers

Thanks Chris.

Mary Fran, wonderful to see you and I wish I were with you in person. Yes, well, we're all getting to that soon. So the world is starting to open up again, and for a massive extrovert like myself, I'm so busy making lunch dates with people. I'll have to drive to Hartford, we can have lunch.

So you know, surprisingly, I feel like wow, we have done so much and we didn't miss a beat. Let me start by saying it all goes to the core of who we are as an organization and who we've been over the past 160 plus years. It's all about delivering the Travelers promise, making sure that we're taking care of our customers, our employees, our partners, and our communities. And our reaction throughout the past year and a half has been nothing short of that. As an industry in general, we decided that addressing the financial needs and the well-being of our customers and partners was key and top of the list. So creating lenient payment arrangements was a part of what we saw across many of the prominent players in this, including ourselves. One of the benefits of course early on, as we all remember, in the beginning like 16 or so months ago, was the fact that because people were driving far less or there were far fewer people driving, that generally there was a lower frequency of claims. And so as a result, this allowed us to provide even more leniency and so we provided a 15% credit on auto premiums and we did that for three months last year. So that was on the customer side. Of course, on the employee side, that was top of mind for us. And I remember it was literally probably on the 12th or 13th of March that we decided we probably had no choice but to go fully remote. And on March 16th, we were fully remote. What went into that from the technology organization was a huge amount of effort, which of course there was a lot of preparation built into, but enabling that was just incredible. And to do it in a way where it was secure and our people had the tools they needed to get to. And that was on the employee side. And then I would say last but certainly not least, our ability to show up digitally and virtually for our customers was probably key and core to how we've been able to operate as a business over the past year and a half.

So we had a very explicit strategy in place that of course ensured that we continue to perform as a company because our viability of the business is what affords us all to be around. And yet very much also accepting the fact that technology and many things around us are changing at an unprecedented pace and we need to ensure that we have a transform agenda that's couched in three areas: continuing to advance our risk expertise, which is at the core of what we do as an insurance organization; but then also ensure that we're creating great experiences, customer centricity really becoming a key part of what insurers in the past may not have been paying attention to, but understanding that companies like Amazon, Google, Netflix, and others have just instilled in every consumer the expectation that they are at the core of everything and they want things to show up digitally, to be seamless, and to be easy for them. And of course, a drive toward productivity and efficiency. And I'd say technology and data are core to each of these three areas. So the investments that we had put in place were already occurring. What happened with everyone going home and not having the ability to physically show up was the adoption rate. So we weren't like some other industries where they hadn't made the investments. We had absolutely, and not only as an industry but as a company, made those choices. But it was the adoption rates that we suddenly saw go through the roof. And so there are three areas that I'll highlight for you. One is in the world of claims. And of course, as you can imagine, that's really probably the biggest interaction where the customer truly experiences their insurance company and how much they take care of them. So during the pandemic, the use of our virtual claim handling tools went up in a huge way. Over 70% of our auto and property claims were using these tools. So it could be anything from taking a photo and sending it in and our estimating capabilities that allowed us to do things virtually, to leveraging video, the video inspection process for evaluating the interior of properties, something like a FaceTime-like app that we could have our customers work with our claim professionals for real-time inspection. And so we just saw that number shoot up and we logged tens of thousands of hours of that kind of interaction. In the workers' comp side of things, similar thing again with the virtual visit capabilities with our nurses and medical case managers. And I know you've had folks on the telemetry side of things that certainly also was an experience that we started to leverage a lot between providing that virtual interaction between our claimants, customers, and third-party medical providers. Things that just shot up in a huge way, Mary Fran. Like numbers like we have 40 times as much of those interactions in the telemedicine side as we had prior. Things that we think are going to go back? I think they have forever changed that interaction. So that's on the claim side. On the service side, where we have a lot of people who could just call in and ask some simple questions, we had in 2020 launched our virtual assistant solution, which is an AI-based solution that really attempts to answer a lot of simple questions that people may call in. So we want to make sure we're not taking up the valuable time of our operations professionals. As the pandemic started, there was a huge number of questions that started coming in. So we hadn't necessarily picked up on that, and that's where the machine learning suddenly started to see a trend in the data of the types of questions that were getting asked. So we leveraged that opportunity to train our model to see what some of those categories of questions were and the answers. Given the way AI works, with the larger volume our model became much more accurate. So we just shot up again. We saw the increase in the number of engagements and the correctness of the answers that were coming back from the machine.

Absolutely. And again, machine learning is all about learning, which is why also the quality of the data that goes in is important. And that's a great point. We've got both a holistic view into the data and you've got the right type of data. So again, the more volume you have, the more opportunity there is for learning.

I mean, there's so much temptation to just get enamored with the technology itself and just think of examples of things that you build. But we start everything hand in hand with our business, focusing on business outcomes. And what outcomes, the key results that we want to achieve. A couple of years ago we drove toward setting up our teams, and by our teams I mean our business teams and our technology professionals, into product teams – together in pods that have a very specific set of outcomes they are focused on, which are very aligned to our business strategies across our three business segments and our claim function. Starting from those business outcomes, defining how we would measure the success of those outcomes is how the groups start. Then building capabilities and solutions couched in technology and data that drive towards those outcomes. And really having that customer centricity perspective, but also understanding the value of building things iteratively, starting with the outcome and what the customer wants, what the stakeholder you're building for wants, and building your capabilities from there. Putting it in the hands of the user, getting feedback, and that iterative approach is how your solution continues to get better. That's really what's at the core of agile: customer centricity, an iterative approach, and that continuous feedback loop. And as you're approaching these building solutions, you ensure that it's desirable – which of course if it's customer centric and you're getting feedback, that happens all the time; that it's viable – there's a business case around it; and of course it's feasible – technologically feasible. So design thinking is at the core of what we do. So, elements and principles of agile and design thinking and really how engineering organizations work with the customer and user at the center is what has gone into it. And the teams being small teams, as Amazon calls them two-pizza teams, small teams that work together, sit together, are one team, they may come from different parts of the organization but they work together. Those are the teams and they spend the majority of the time together, whether physically or of course over the past year and a half virtually, and do the work. So those are some of the elements, Mary Fran. And it's a journey. We launched this agile transformation in a big way with our business. Our technology teams had been operating in that way for a while, but by definition because we didn't have the business people in it, we weren't cross-functional. So the core of what's at the heart of agile wasn't necessarily fully in it. So bringing our business into it was really a big step. And incredibly enough, as we launched into that journey, we all went home, so we did a lot of it virtually.

Great question, Mary Fran. Look, I would say many companies were able to leverage digital and technology and not miss a beat, and yet I'd say we were probably pulling from the incredible deep relationships that we've built over the years. And there is no doubt in my mind that that human connection is absolutely core. And you're right, by the way, connecting with the last question of agile, one of the tenets of agile was always co-location. I remember the room, right? Absolutely, like being together, the ability to see each other, the ability to have conversations. And I think that is absolutely still true. And I'd say technology is not yet there to give you that full experience. It'll probably come, but I don't know if I'll be able to – probably sooner than we think and later than many might claim. So hybrid is at the core of what we've decided as an organization. We of course wanted to make sure we leveraged a lot of the incredible learnings that we had over the last year and a half of where, as we talked about it, we learned how tools and virtual capabilities can help you do many things where you don't necessarily need to be together. And yet, over the last 160 years, we have learned how as an organization everything around being together and those experiences that you create, whether it's about running into each other at the proverbial water cooler or the cafeteria, or actually planned get-togethers where you get to do whiteboarding much more dynamically than something that you can do virtually. There are many tools out there that let you do that, but that real ability to have working sessions, I think when it comes to innovation and transformational efforts, it'll be important to bring that back. So really asking everyone, giving them the option of having some remote work, which we did – we didn't really have before except in very small pockets – but having this as an option across the enterprise, and ensuring also that we show up together and that we give the opportunity to the hundreds of employees that we've hired over the past year and a half, some of whom haven't even met the people.

Not yet, not yet. We're getting there. I was actually in our Hartford offices the first couple of days this weekend and so I walked around. We still, we were actually we had started this renewal of our buildings a while ago and they're coming to an end. We've got some incredible spaces. Speaking of the return to office, another core part is that we have started creating a lot of collaboration spaces. Obviously we're going to be very aware of CDC guidelines and ensuring we keep all of that in mind and pivot as necessary. But we're getting ready for having many of our associates back together in the spaces that we have. I'd say the other result of this past year and a half was the fact that we learned how important it is to have the ability to have hybrid meetings where the experience with those in the rooms and those remote is as good and on equal footing. And I'd say that's a big change from what might have been in place in the past where it was all about who was in the room.

So really some of the basic things, as we start to go back, ensuring every meeting both has a physical and a virtual place, ensuring that the quality of the sound through the microphones is as good in the rooms as it is remotely. And it's not going to be easy because some of the technologies still need a lot of work. And much of the hard work was for our infrastructure and network teams to ensure that as we all went home, that worked well. They've done a huge amount of work to ensure that we're ready for the return, and we're going to keep our eyes open and then I'm sure we'll learn and get better and better at it. You're going to stay flexible. Nobody gets to kick back and say job done.

So again, starting with the business strategies of course being first because again it is about prioritization. You can't keep up with every technology that's happening and just keep building things. Going back to that expression of we're not just building things, we're really prioritizing based on business needs. Then also understanding that some things will depend on a set of platforms that will enable and will have to be built at the center. So as you start out with the business outcomes and with the experiences that you prioritize, ensuring that you're keeping that in mind. This has enabled us to really group our efforts from a technology perspective in a few areas. First and foremost, it's talent, Mary Fran. So our focus on talent, the fact that engineering and really deep technical understanding married with that business understanding is core to everything we do. But having those deep engineers have the ability to sit in those teams with our business people and work together, design and build and show and pivot. So focus on talent, both recruiting as I've talked about before, but also continuing to upskill and reskill as needed, whether it's refilling from some of the older settings like some of the folks that we have working in mainframe environments on newer skill sets, to moving to the cloud and other things. Then of course, continuing to ensure that everyone understands the agile ways of working and the ability to prioritize, make decisions, create backlogs, and put things into market. And then thirdly, there's a huge effort that we have around simplifying and modernizing. As a company for whom information and data are at the core, and systems and automation have been a key part, we don't manufacture gadgets. We know everything we do is based on information and from our risk expertise and experience we create. So we've got years of things that we have built. So again, in a prioritized order, we have absolutely started to modernize a lot of things, and that requires a lot of effort. There are areas where we may have had a lot of technical debt and probably continue to do so. And really working through how do we drive towards those common, extensible set of capabilities built on microservices, really API-enabled, to allow us to connect to these newer ecosystems where our customers expect us to show up. It's not always about them coming to us as an insurance organization, but we need to be embedded in other experiences. For instance, it becomes more and more part of some of the business that they do when they buy something – the ability to have the warranty or the insurance that goes with it, as I'm sure many of us have experienced when you buy your iPhone and things like that. So those are a few areas that we're very much focused on. And then of course, continuing to absolutely ensure that we're advancing in areas of analytics and AI, because we know that's going to make a big difference from how we interact with our customers, whether it's guiding our operations professionals on what are the next best set of questions to ask, or how to categorize the customer who's calling in, or ensure that they've got visibility at a 360 view of the customer who's calling and all the interactions with them. So these are all the key areas we're focusing on.

Not in those, but you know, I mean technologies which like one of them we're using right now. From leveraging Zoom to video conferencing capabilities, we've been in meetings where within the room there were multiple screens that were set up. Some of them were projecting the presentations or the demos we were looking at, and others were projecting the screen similar to what you see on the laptop, but these were on screens around the room. So as we talked to folks both those in the room who could hear and participate and those on the screen, we have a whole team that's been working diligently over the past six months. It's a cross-functional team made up of some of our operations folks, of course our technology folks especially from the audio visual side, and some of our business teams who really have been paying attention to everything from as we come back, what are the tools that we want to make sure people have still at their home when they're working remotely, and how we provide similar sets of tools in the offices as well, and that they're as standard as possible. We've got folks who are going around and testing things out. And then we also have a set of guidelines that we've provided to those setting up the meetings, like best practices. And really making sure that we're approaching this as an initiative and a project. And we also want to make sure people are patient and provide as much feedback. Those are a few things we've done. Good. Those are one of the first meetings, Mary Fran, where I happened to actually be remote in that meeting and some of my colleagues were in person, and the sound quality, there was a lot of feedback. So that was feedback that I provided to our audio visual team, and so they've gone around and tested all the mics and everything like that. So this continues to just get better.

I would couch it deeply in how we're investing in our people and our focus on talent. Making sure people have the right skill sets. And for a company for whom data is at the core of everything we do, and every person in their role is creating data whether they're aware of it or not, was something that we focused on in a big way. As we brought on our leader for data in the organization, we decided that really ensuring that regardless of what your role is – whether you're part of the claim organization, or the student foundation, or an underwriter – really understanding the meaning of data and then having a map of how data from the moment you start a conversation with the customer to how that data travels through some of our systems and gets manipulated to how it comes back and plays a role in the next conversation you have with the customer. And that if the quality of the data weren't as good, or if the data weren't as holistic as it needs to be, it can really get in the way or it won't have as much potential as it could have. For that to become more and more clear, our teams created these incredible data knowledge maps that we have started as part of a series of trainings and learnings, some of which were in person and many of which have become online. We have driven towards educating every single one of our 30,000 employees in this, and now we're about a third through the organization. The organization has truly embraced this understanding that data is again the raw material which then turns into useful information and then the process and the changes that that information can go through to create insights, whether it's for the underwriter as they're doing the pricing, insights about the customer so that they price that risk the right way, or as claims come in, which ones are the right ones based on insights that the claim professional has to allow that to go through straight through processing versus spending a lot more time on. But those are some of the things in our data culture and the learning culture where we're bringing to the forefront. And there are other elements to the learning as well.

Absolutely. And we really leveraged those and had them customized for each area to make sure that it really was couched in specific use cases that made a lot of sense to the people going through it.

You know, I think so. Funny enough, it kind of leans back into the word culture, Mary Fran. And actually it's really how we show up, each every single individual, how they show up, how they act, how they behave, and everything we talked about. Whether it's about building things as an engineer in the new way, whether it's cloud-based, microservices-based, or other, or thinking about things from the perspective of the customer and the user first, or thinking about data right up front before you even put a word of code, so that data is not a thought to how you use data in every conversation you have. All of that is really about the mindset and the culture. And for a company that's been around for a long time, you can imagine that we have a strong culture, and it's an incredibly powerful one that has allowed us to be who we are. And yet we're also very focused on how do we continue to evolve, especially on the technology and operations side. There are a few elements of those cultures that we want to highlight because they're going to allow us to do a lot of what we want to do, whether it's innovation, tech modernization, getting rid of technical debt much more easily. And the way we've been talking about it, we have a group of employees, and this kind of got born as we started to discuss it among the employees themselves, who've called themselves the Culture Club, a much more fun take after the famous Breakfast Club for those of us who are old enough to know what it is. And they're really focused on saying how do we make sure that customer centricity, having empowered teams that are autonomous and yet aligned, empower the ability to prioritize because we have so much coming at us, and then finally that learning culture we talked about, test and learn. These four elements are a core part of who we are and how we operate. And really moving from wanting to do everything to really prioritizing. From where we are, collaborative is phenomenal, but sometimes we can do that at a fault. So ensuring that we give our teams the autonomy to make decisions, empowering them. So those are some of the evolutions that we think are important. And I'd say that's for me top of mind, because that's the foundation of a lot of what we do. We have our strategy, but strategy alone won't result in those business outcomes. Strategy plus culture, and the culture piece is the one that's really top of mind.

Absolutely. So from RPA, let me start with the basics of RPA. RPA is funny because it's one of those things that's been around for a long time. It's at the core of it about a lot of batch processing that can happen from screen scraping to a lot of automation. And through that, done at scale, that has made a big difference. Along the lines of our claim processes, that's what we've leveraged quite a bit to automate things that were repeatable processes where we could actually teach the robots to do that multiple times. We've got over 40 or so processes along the claim process that have leveraged this in a big way and have extended that into other parts of our function. So I'd say in the continuum of AI, RPA is probably kind of at the lower end of where a lot of companies start. I remember Tom Davenport, in a conversation I was having with him, and he's usually touted as the father of AI, and he said if you want to start with AI, start with robotic process automation, RPA. And there are many players out there from Automation Anywhere to Blue Prism to other things that can start with. So that's on the RPA side. You've got to pay a lot of attention with RPA though to the continuum of processes, because again if something upfront breaks, it can have impacts down the road. So those are some of the learnings that a lot of companies as they've implemented RPA have done. And then the other question was the Internet of Things, IoT. I tend to think of IoT as devices that are attached to things like sensors, but I know that IoT has a much broader impact. The explosion of IoT and the number of sensors, we've already seen an explosion of IoT as a result of data that emanates from these things, whether it's our Apple Watch, to your phones, to many many things. So we're already leveraging IoT. It's in our telematics program. As we bring on our personal insurance customers, a consumer buys an auto policy, they've got the option to sign up with us so that through their phone – and it used to be through a dongle, and now it's moved on – our program is through the phone for the first 90 days of their policy. They can sign up to have their driving behavior be evaluated, and if that behavior is a positive one, and in many cases it is, they actually get discounts. So of course it is an opt-in. And that's just one example. And as vehicles start to have a lot of those capabilities – I believe 30% of vehicles on the road in this age are connected – actually not as much of that connectivity is being leveraged as directly. Again, that's going to become more and more of where both in our underwriting process and also in the claim process there will be more opportunities to leverage it. Imagine a day that you get into your car, on your phone you put in the destination, and through the integration of Google Maps and many other things, you not only get the destination you're going to, but you're told hey if you took that route there's a lower chance of accidents. And then potentially your insurer can say okay if you take that route, you're opting in for safer driving. So the advent of insurance on demand, pay as you go, whatever you call it, things like that are out there and IoT can enable them. Just some examples.

Absolutely. There are four things that as an organization we know we want to keep and have been core to our success. And that's really the core of our culture. And by the way, I just want to emphasize the fact that the core of our culture and who we are as a Traveler, and as a place – we refer to Travelers as a place, every single employee knows that word – and we want to keep that. So if you ask any Travelers employee what defines you, they'll say collaboration. And we want to keep that. That's something that has been core to our success. But we also want to make sure while we are collaborative, we also have the ability to make decisions quickly enough and ensure that we are empowering the right people to make the right decisions. So it's about collaboration, it's about long-term thinking. So despite being a Dow 30 public company, we're long-term thinkers. We're not just focused on the next quarter. That wouldn't be how we've been so successful. As any company who's been around for 160 years, we've weathered at least a couple of financial crises. So long-term thinking. But I would say putting the place first, as our CEO and Chairman Alan Schnitzer says, really thinking about Travelers and the place. And that's where our technology and operations 'common as possible, unique as necessary' goes, thinking enterprise-wide and putting the place first. And then last but certainly not least, being invested in everybody else's success. So I would say core to every single thing I said is that it's always about the bigger thing that we're about. It's not about just me as an individual, it's about us, it's about the place, it's about our customers, our partners, and our communities.

Yeah, and you know I would say the place has always been a larger, grander thing. It was about everything. Now the world has evolved where that's become maybe the reality. And that virtual and the place are getting closer because now we can through our tools make the physical and the virtual come together. And it is about the grander Travelers and the entirety of the place, and even the larger part of our ecosystems. It is about our customers and everything that we do. So that's how I think about it.

That's such an intuitive question and such a fantastic question. Because I would say the best execution will fail if that change management isn't there and if people aren't coming with you. And what is core to every change management is communication upfront, transparency, and involving the people who are part of that change and ensuring that they own it and are part of it. So again, in everything, and that's where I would say the power of bringing different parts of your business along with your deep technologists together so that together they're driving the change becomes important. And in everything we do, even in our implementation of Teams as a collaboration tool, our communications organization is right there with our teams. They are the product owners, the team leaders, the group that sits with our engineers who are doing that, and really defining everything from the governance of the teams, how many teams do we create, who's got the ability to have teams, so that it doesn't become just a mess of stuff, that there truly is an architecture to it, a business architecture to it. So I'd say communication, planning, ensuring you've got involvement, and probably again another core principle of agile being dedicated resources, so that you don't have people doing 30 things and spending a little bit of time. Having those dedicated teams focused on one or two key things that they're working on becomes key.

Thanks, Mary Fran. Look, as a woman in a field such as technology where, while you know the first computers were women, right? Like we've seen Hidden Figures, no more. And yet as the field of computing became far more attractive, somehow our gender started to lose ground. So I studied computer science as you said at Georgia Tech and was keenly aware of that. And then on top of it, as an immigrant really coming in, that element of ensuring that we have as many women, women of color, and people who are disadvantaged in everything we do, I know that's been core to what I believe in. And I think actually it makes for a better business. Because much like your AI models learn from data, if your data is wrong or if your data is biased, decisions are biased. It's the same for how we operate as humans. If you've got a team all of whom are of the same mindset and have grown up the same way making decisions, their decisions will be very biased and not necessarily in the right way. And over 50% of the world is made up of women. So that's like a passion of mine. The number of women in the fields of STEM is not as high, so I've been very focused on ensuring that we do something about that starting very early on. My involvement with Girls Who Code, Reshma Saujani's organization and now with Tarik Barrett as the CEO, that's been a passion of mine. I've been a mentor to Girls Who Code for many years. Last year we actually brought Girls Who Code and one of their summer immersions into Travelers. A seven-week physical internship became a two-week virtual one. But my understanding is that actually that has given Girls Who Code the ability to bring girls from all walks of life and are much more nationally together and have even more diverse groups that can work together, and they're going to continue around that. So that's one of the many things that we're doing at Travelers. Among some other things, a couple of years ago I started our Empower Plus organization, which is the group of technology and operations women and their allies. The plus sign is a symbol of allies, men and others, really promoting the cause for women and their careers and professions, both internally at Travelers and in our communities where we're very prominent among women and women of color. So those are just a couple of examples.

That's actually our She Travels, which is external. That's with our CEO and a few of our other leaders. Across the board, we're really creating at Travelers is leading the way in defining the insurance industry as a much more inclusive place for women, and working hand-in-hand with our agents and brokers. It's something that a couple of our other leaders, our Chief Marketing Officer and Joan Woodward who leads our Wednesday with Woodward's, and among the other things, and our Travelers Institute, she leads that. So they are the program that they lead, but every one of our executives is a full supporter of that. Empower Plus is structured to fall underneath that umbrella, so that's the connection there.

Look, it didn't surprise me that I learned because I know there's so much that I will have to learn, and any leader that doesn't know that they still have a long way to go to learn, they will always continue to learn. So it didn't surprise me that there was a lot that I could learn. I'd say one of the things that it's highlighted for me was the power of listening and really how much that drives empathy. And really as you listen, taking that feedback and putting it into action. And so that's probably the one thing that I learned and really drove myself to practice more and more. So in the beginning, as we all went home, I put in place these calls that we would invite all of the employees to, and I would share some information but I would also then provide the ability to ask me anything. Employees had the opportunity to ask questions. So really listening to them, when I didn't know the answer, I can tell you there are many things I didn't know the answer to, I would very openly say it. And it was incredible that just with the power of just listening and making sure people knew that they had been heard, and then doing my best to go and get the answers where there were answers, made a difference. So I'd say that's probably one of the biggest learnings. And I will do my best to continue to have that be part of how I operate as a leader.

Mary Fran, thank you. It was my privilege and thanks for the opportunity to talk about Travelers and our great people and the great work that they do.