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“If you called to ask Rose something and she couldn’t answer, she will say, `Sorry, I just spilled wine on my top and need to change into something more comfortable. Let me get you to a live agent,’” said Clara de Soto, cofounder of Reply.ai, the company that created Rose’s conversational strategy in partnership with The Cosmopolitan’s digital marketing agency R/GA.
Russ Banham is a Los Angeles-based technology writer.
Math has been the one constant in Henna Karna’s life.
The chief data officer of XL Catlin today heads up the data and digital transformation team at the global property/casualty insurer and reinsurer. She is widely considered to be one of the foremost data scientists in the insurance industry, beginning her career initially as an actuary and then becoming a predictive modeler and cryptographer for several government agencies.
Karna subsequently worked in both the business and technology sides of high technology and financial services companies, and spent a brief period in academia. She returned to the public sector to lead disruptive digital innovations at Verisk Analytics and AIG, serving the latter as global head of data and technology for the actuarial organization. She’s taking her work to the next level at XL Catlin, which has embarked on a robust initiative to make data a competitive differentiator and the nucleus of all business decisions.
In these regards, XL Catlin is at the vanguard of the P/C insurance industry, which some see as being in the midst of an existential crisis. Under attack by InsurTech startups predicated on more efficient ways to underwrite, process and distribute insurance, carriers can no longer abide legacy operations and technology. It’s either transform or die; otherwise, customers will turn to competitors that sell innovative insurance coverages tailored specifically to their needs at lower premiums.
Karna is no stranger to difficult challenges. She came to the United States as a child from Purnia, India, the fifth largest of 38 cities within Bihar state, a rural area in the country’s eastern region. Purnia’s small farms produce multiple crops like rice, potatoes and wheat. It is one of India’s least literate cities, yet Karna’s father, Arun, persevered to become the first in his family to graduate college. He later received a master’s in mechanical engineering.
Her mother, Pushpa, a homeopathic doctor, came from a family that had been part of Ghandi’s movement in the second Indian Revolution. Post-independence, the family achieved a more comfortable existence. Pushpa’s father received his master’s in mechanical engineering from Oxford University in England and a Ph.D. in India. Arun sought to do the same and moved the family to Narragansett, R.I., to attend the University of Rhode Island.
Tough as these conditions were, they were nothing compared to the virulent racism her family experienced. Narragansett then and today is almost completely white, with the most recent U.S. Census tallying a 95.8 percent population of Caucasians.
Through their ordeals, the family found refuge in academics. Today, Karna’s sister is a physician and her two brothers work at Goldman Sachs and as a serial entrepreneur, respectively.
In middle school, Karna read epic fantasy books involving different worlds than the one in which she lived (David Eddings was her favorite author). She started reading Marvel comic books and was particularly attracted to The X-Men, relating to their singularities—the mutations that had made them superheroes. She nurtured her first real friendships with a girl named Maya and a boy named Benjamin, whose families were of European descent and welcoming.
Karna also found inspiration in the lives led by two historical figures—Abraham Lincoln and Rani Lakshmibai, a young woman who led the first revolt against British rule in India in 1857. Lakshmibai was 29 years old and queen of the princely state of Jhansiin in Northern India, having married the local Maharaja.
Karna gradually came out of her shell in high school. She became more vocal in class and no longer tried to conform to others’ expectation of what it meant to be American. As she developed confidence in her abilities, she discovered a newfound love for being Indian.
She excelled in the subject. While in high school, she also indulged her creative interests, applying them to woodworking. She eventually got an after-school job carving walking canes. “I worked for this woman who gave me $30 for every cane I carved and then sold them for $450 each,” she said, laughing at the sheer capitalism.
Karna, who is tasked with building this gateway, explained its value: “By being able to access intelligent data instantly across the enterprise, our people, customers and partners like brokers will have the information they need to improve every link in the insurance value chain,” she said.
XL Catlin is making the hunt vastly simpler and easier. “We started by analyzing our ‘current state’ business capabilities—underwriting, actuarial work, how we go to market, product distribution, claims and so on—measuring dozens of metrics like the length of time it took in each case to extract information,” said Karna.
Her team then brainstormed how to speed up these processes while increasing the rigor and quality of data at the same time. Recently, the architecture needed to move different datasets in real time to the containerized micro-databases that have been built. Insurance processes like underwriting and claims can now draw from the containers.