A Tech Titan on a Mission to Resolve Challenges in the Financial Services Industry

Introduction

In the ever-evolving landscape of insurance services, Google LLC’s attempts to enter the Insurance and Financial Services industry have faced their fair share of challenges. Back in 2015, the company launched its auto insurance offering, only to discontinue it a year later in 2016.

However, in 2020, Google took a different approach by enlisting the expertise of tech entrepreneur Henna Karna to spearhead their new insurance practice. Despite initial general skepticism regarding Google’s understanding of the insurance business, Henna’s competence and skill set proved invaluable in changing the tide. Several articles alluded to Henna as the “Champion of Holistic Insurance.”

Henna’s Approach to Google’s Insurance Venture

At Google, Henna engaged with over 600+ financial services and insurance companies, including consumer and commercial P&C, Life, Annuities, Retirement, Brokers, and Agents, to identify their pain points. She made an effort to “not only lean in and understand the cause of their bottleneck but what limited them from giving more value to their end customer.”  Henna embarked on a technological revolution by determining the setbacks that prevented these companies from bringing innovative solutions for their customers.

Prior to Google, Henna designed the strategy and the execution of several artificial intelligent, digital platforms at AXA, Verisk Analytics, and AIG. Each product was considered ahead of its time and shifted the approach to risk management and mitigation.

Modern Challenges for Financial Services and Henna’s Solutions

Like Google, many other financial services have been facing problems in their business. With increased dependence on technology, new challenges are coming up that these organizations are not equipped to handle.

Through her expertise, Henna has summed up some major problems these companies face and has provided viable solutions to tackle them.

Solving Internal Data Provisioning, Access, and Reconciliation

Henna shares that the significant challenges the financial services companies face are data related. These companies grapple with vast amounts of data while ensuring the maintenance of their regulatory requirements, privacy and security. Silo-ed external data also posed a challenge to business and data architecture.

Henna proposed a two-fold remedy: first, she improved the architecture and foundation for consumption and storage of data. She focused on ingesting unstructured data in visual, voice, documents, and other formats. Second, she prioritized data enrichment while maintaining customer data security and privacy. She designed an integrated ecosystem for information on existing underwriting, claims, pricing, reserving, and financial systems to mitigate risk and recover from losses.

A Different Outlook on Risk Management

Many financial services companies relied on outdated risk profiles and risk exposure, often coupled with neglecting the underlying effects of technical debt.

Henna built out a new proficiency layer that applied analytics at scale to technically build risk mitigation and risk recovery solutions in an affordable, simple, and comprehensive way

Henna firmly believes that the ratio between how long it takes to understand damage and quality of recovery is a critical measurement of what is considered a successful company. She emphasized analyzing the damage caused at the earliest to allow for faster recovery from losses.

Augmenting Decision-Making

Additionally, she recognized the common focus to modernize multiple policy admin systems (PAS) to tackle technical debt, enhance configuration capabilities, and foster innovation to meet business requirements, was only the starting point of a modern, analytically savvy industry. Her mission became to raise the bar when it came to insight-heavy decision making throughout the insurance value chain.

Her innovative strategies facilitated prompt responses to damages and complaints, leading to quick reformative recovery. This approach also proved beneficial in handling disasters with broader impacts, such as earthquakes, cyclones, and floods.

Conclusion

The products and solutions Henna has provided over the last decade have ensured customer value and reduced the global protection gap, approaching $1.2T, doubling revenues for many insurance companies.

It was all possible due to Henna’s ability to see beyond the surface and dive deeper to find and implement out-of-the-box solutions for root complications. Her results were successful because they were driven by garnering customer satisfaction and the maximum profit possible.

To gain deeper insights into Henna Karna’s contribution to the financial services and insurance companies, follow her here.