The Future of Insurance Podcast – Chetan Kandhari, Chief Innovation & Digital Officer, Nationwide

As Chief Innovation and Digital Officer, Chetan is accountable for leading the company's digital vision and maturing our enterprise digital capabilities and expertise while creating new customer-centric products and services for members and partners.

Chetan is a visionary leader who has repeatedly developed high performing teams to work towards a common vision and purpose. During his 18-year career at Nationwide, Chetan successfully delivered several of the industry's largest transformations, with more than $1B in investment towards creating single core platforms for Policy, Claims, Customer and Data.

In his tenure as the leader of digital and innovation, Chetan and his teams have advanced Nationwide's strategy through digitization of customer journeys and the development of a robust innovation portfolio. Leading with a people-first philosophy, Chetan has fostered a culture of experimentation and collaboration, guided by a strong commitment to customer-centricity and focus on technology based innovation. His ability to anticipate and embrace change has accelerated innovation efforts and amplified key business outcomes for Nationwide.

Chetan holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from The Ohio State University, a Master of Science in Information Systems from Miami University, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Muskingum University.

Highlights from the Show

• Chetan runs the enterprise innovation and digital area, which is here to help focus on what's coming in the future
• They think about the meta trends impacting insurance, insureds and insurers like autonomous driving, climate change, GenAI and more
• Nationwide thinks about three things when looking at how to structure your innovation efforts so it's not just a hobby but something that has actual tangible benefit
• As an industry, there are several things that hold us back, including the standard answers (regulation, it's not a sexy industry), but also things like what we sell not being easily understood / being complex; because the cost of product is unknown at the time of sale, it's very risky to do something new in the space because you won't know if it was a big mistake until it's been far too long to do anything about it; there's a misnomer in the idea of innovation being about something completely new but rather something disruptive
• Gen AI is something Nationwide has been looking at, and doing some real, tangible things with, mainly focused on how to enable their people to be materially more empathetic much faster
• Horizon 3 outlook is very much about how connected things impact what Nationwide does
• Chetan says we need to decide who we are, first movers, fast followers or laggards

This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance book series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.

Follow the podcast at future-of-insurance.com/podcast for more details and other episodes.

Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.