Ted Hughes is SVP and CITO at American Equity Investment Life Insurance Company, with more than 25 years of insurance technology experience, including roles as regional CIO for a global broker dealer and operating officer for a large property-casualty software company. He is a board member for the Global Insurance Accelerator.
What are your top priorities for the next 6-12 months?
We’re in a major initiative to unify data across the organization to optimize processes and business decisions made at all levels. The team is moving all of our data through a governance and scrubbing process to get it into a single source of truth. We’re looking at enabling business intelligence processes through historical, analytical and predictive reporting. The benefits will be the use of better data to produce efficiency gains, risk reduction and added value/opportunities for our future.
We’re continuing to do process improvements in our operations organizations. We continue to add to our straight-through processing initiative with the goal to add automation so our people are doing more of the higher-value work, such as exceptions. Another initiative is to improve our product delivery processes by adding a management tool for approvals and single point of entry.
What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen recently?
The biggest change is there’s no longer a question about who should be driving innovation. We are seeing a trend that it does not matter where the innovation ideas come from. There needs to be a healthy level of trust and respect that business and IT, both at the table to evaluate the value.
What do you see as some of the biggest challenges ahead?
The life and annuity markets are changing, including the roles in the processes, different carriers entering the markets, and rate of technology tools emerging. It’s difficult to remain competitive and relevant if you do not have processes that can incorporate change at a high rate. Supporting the rate of change without increasing your IT costs or IT head count is one of our biggest challenges.
How do you see emerging technology affecting technology strategy in annuities specifically?
There’s a couple of places. One, when you start to look at servicing, technology is going to play a big role. Annuities are a complex insurance product, and customers have a lot of questions. The advancing of technology in allowing businesses to service customers through conversational tools should have a big effect.
The increase in integrations between all the players in our market has provided an exciting and challenging opportunity. Integration processes with using more advanced Enterprise translation tools are becoming necessary to moving the data to the appropriate places
How have you and your team leveraged the Novarica relationship?
We have had nothing but amazing information from Novarica. It was one of those gaps the industry needed to fill—a research and advisory firm with deep insurance expertise, including an understanding of the technology trends. We leverage almost all aspects of what Novarica offers. The research really leapfrogs us into a decision. In addition, just being able to explain how we compare in the industry is critical, especially at the board level.
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