As part of our ongoing focus on innovation in the insurance industry, ACORD names annual Top Ten InsurTech Leaders.
Be sure to check out our most recent list. ACORD’s 2017 Top Ten InsurTech Leaders were:
Shaun Crawford
Global Insurance Leader, EY
Leading EY’s $1.4BN insurance practice worldwide, Crawford is responsible for servicing a significant portion of the global insurance industry. He has designed and delivered major transformation and start-up initiatives on behalf of top European insurers, in addition to developing cutting-edge InsurTech thought leadership. With accomplishments in areas such as Blockchain, IoT, and use-based insurance, Crawford is truly driving meaningful change through emerging technologies.
John Cusano
Senior Managing Director, Global Insurance, Accenture
Cusano is responsible for setting the overall vision and strategy for Accenture’s global insurance practice, serving 30 of the top 35 insurance companies in the Fortune Global 500. He is a prolific publisher of meaningful thought leadership on not only emerging tech trends such as digitization, AI, and autonomous vehicles but on change itself. He provides regular insights on how to excel at transformation, and how insurers can turn the InsurTech start-up boom into an opportunity rather than a threat.
Shirine Khoury-Haq
Chief Operating Officer, Lloyd’s of London
Khoury-Haq has taken on the daunting leadership responsibility of overseeing transformation at the world’s oldest insurance organization. At 331 years old, Lloyd’s has a copious amount of accumulated legacy capabilities, which she is pairing with digitization and modernization to drive change throughout the London market. Industry veteran Khoury-Haq’s deft leadership and change management skills are bringing together a large and diverse array of stakeholders, and keeping her venerable institution at the global leading edge.
Elizabeth Leab
New Business Innovation Specialist, Nationwide Insurance
Only five years ago, Leab was fresh out of college and an executive assistant at Nationwide; recently, she led process development and vision implementation for their first innovation lab, Refinery 191. The lab monitors developing trends in the insurance and financial services spaces in order to create a pipeline of disruptive innovations, and Leab takes a hand in strategy, project management, and investor relationships – approaching every aspect of the incubation process with an eye toward creativity.
Jon Lincoln
President & Co-Founder, Veruna
Another visionary under 40, Lincoln has parlayed hard work and iconoclasm into success. He is President and Co-Founder of Veruna, which made its mark at only one year old, winning the Industry Innovator category of the 2016 ACORD Insurance Innovation Challenge. Veruna boldly proclaims that it is “the result of years of frustration with ‘good enough’ insurance industry technology,” and that its agency management system is “challenging independent insurance agents to walk away from the status quo and embrace change.”
Atul Sood
General Manager, TAL Services Ltd.
A visionary architect for leading Australian life insurer TAL, Sood truly understands how data standards can lead to efficiency. He not only oversees the delivery of end-to-end solutions which lead to meaningful impact but also develops key thought leadership on the adoption of standards in life insurance. A 30-year veteran of multiple industries, Sood makes it his mission to “strike the optimal balance between business innovation and IT efficiency,” and continuously works to demonstrate how properly leveraging standards can lead to a competitive edge.
Jeff To
Global Head of Insurance, Salesforce
Salesforce, as an organization, penetrates every major high-performing insurance organization globally, and true thought leader To leads their insurance practice. His efforts in this arena have enabled digitization of the customer experience and led to material value creation throughout the global insurance value chain. With impressive leadership skills and the vision to leverage sales force automation for impact, To has an enormous potential to affect even more significant change in the industry.
Sabine VanderLinden
Global Managing Director, Startupbootcamp
A growth expert who has worked with over 100 leading financial institutions, VanderLinden is the head of Startupbootcamp’s trailblazing InsurTech area. Startupbootcamp identifies, recruits, and accelerates InsurTech startups and mentors them at every stage, from developing an idea, to bringing it to market, to ultimately selling. With over 80% of their startups since 2010 still active, VanderLinden and Startupbootcamp have demonstrated a keen ability to pick winners and nurture them to ensure their success.
Larry Wilson
Director, Duck Creek Technologies
Wilson is truly the father of InsurTech. He essentially invented the insurance software industry when he founded Policy Management Systems Corp. (PMSC) in 1974, and Agency Management Systems (now Vertafore) two years later, and his software solutions have found their way into virtually every insurance organization. The truly impressive thing is that despite his longevity, Wilson continues to innovate. He is a board member and investor in Duck Creek and several other businesses at the leading edge of insurance technology.
David Zwiener
Director & Chairman of the Audit Committee, Voya Financial
A veteran of multiple major global insurance companies including The Hartford and PartnerRe, Zwiener continues to drive innovation to this day. Voya recently launched its Behavioral Finance Institute for Innovation, a research initiative intended to conduct groundbreaking studies focused on gaining insight into how Americans make financial and retirement-planning decisions. By drawing upon a novel combination of behavioral science, digital capabilities, and financial expertise, the Institute focuses on translating abstract concepts into large-scale solutions.