Brad Hildestad is EVP and CIO of COUNTRY Financial, with responsibility for providing overall strategic direction for the organization’s technology and information functions, including emerging technologies that support corporate strategies with an emphasis on mobility, security, and improved customer experience. Prior to joining COUNTRY Financial in 2015, he worked in IT at Allstate for 30 years. He holds an MBA from DePaul University. Brad was interviewed for the Novarica Update in 2018.
What are your top priorities for the next 6-12 months?
COUNTRY is a multi-line carrier with a focus on financial security for our customers. We have been executing a consistent strategy over recent years which starts with focus on our customer and ease of doing business for our sales representatives. As a result, we are doing a lot of technology modernization and expanding capabilities through digital interaction. Examples include expanding online billing functions, more digital claims services, and other self-service options through the MyCOUNTRY website and our mobile app. We also have core system replacements underway, new policy administration systems, a new billing system, and we now have a claims system replacement project starting in 2019.
You mentioned digital for both policyholders and agents. What trends have you seen in the adoption of digital channels?
Digital adoption by our customers has grown significantly. We have doubled the users of our mobile app, and new functionality and features make it easy for our customers to do business with our representatives or digitally if they choose. For our representatives, they are seeing new modern policy administration systems, a new billing system with enhanced payment offerings and office productivity tools.
How about inside your IT group itself?
All of COUNTRY technology is enabled by our IT workforce as we have an ongoing focus to make COUNTRY IT a great place to work for all employees. We are diversifying our locations with more IT employees in Atlanta and Minneapolis. In Minneapolis we are moving our office space downtown to improve the work environment for our employees and increase our ability to attract new hires. We have efforts underway to provide more development opportunities for employees and new methods of work such as Agile development and DevOps. In 2017 we opened our DigitaLab at the University of Illinois Research Park, which has proven to be a great source of innovative thinking, engineering talent, and has been great for our existing workforce to be part of an exciting environment and mentor young IT professionals. At COUNTRY it’s all about our employees.
Internal to IT, we focus on simplification and modernization to improve how we deliver technology to COUNTRY. We have a renewed focus on technology architectures that position us well for today and the future. We are investing in new data centers with modern infrastructure, cloud technology where appropriate, cybersecurity, iterative delivery, and speed to market.
We’re also building an internal API marketplace now to advance our microservices capabilities. We think ability to consume services is going to be increasingly important in the future.
How is your business/IT alignment?
We’ve always had a good partnership with our business units and as a result we are working together on existing and emerging technologies. We have an eye on InsureTech with work underway related to IoT sensors, auto telematics, bots, and RPA for improved quality and efficiency. Our business product owners are very invested in our Agile development approach, which is strengthening the relationship and improving our speed as we deliver new products and features. With our mobile app, business and IT are doing many iterative releases a year, which has been received well by our customers and representatives.
We also have a strong partnership in our data analytics program. We work closely together as we progress with predictive analytics, data warehousing, and data governance.
How are you and your team leveraging your Novarica relationship?
First of all, it’s not just my team in IT. We leverage Novarica across the entire business. Novarica is a partner. You help us to make informed decisions related to technology. The material is great in helping our team understand trends, best practices, and the impacts of new technology.
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