2010 Women in Insurance Leadership
For the fifth consecutive year, INN is pleased to recognize and congratulate 10 of the insurance industry's most extrordinary female leaders.
Insurance Networking News, 09/01/2010
Since its inception five years ago, InsuranceNetworking News' presentation of the most influential women in insurance has profiled the extraordinary accomplishments of 32 individuals. We are pleased to add another 10 to that list- women who embody the strength, fortitude and determination necessary for their respective leadership positions. The six Honorees and four Notable Achievers featured this year-with titles ranging from director to CIO-prove that women can positively affect critical processes within the IT and business environments of their organizations.
Nominations were vetted by INN editors, and narrowed down to a "WIL Top 10." Judges then ranked each candidate based on contributions to the institution's top and bottom lines, job complexity, corporate governance and ethics and leadership and management skills. The final scores determined the Honorees and Notable Achievers.
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INN would like to thank the judges-three of the award program's 2009 Honorees:
* Maureen Hegarty, VP, claims operations, Electric Insurance Co.
* Peggy Stewart, EVP & COO, Aon Risk Services
* Jane Tutoki, EVP and chief claims officer, Zurich in North America.
Sallie Graves
Head of Insurance and Distributed Services IT
ING U.S. Insurance
Much like others in insurance technology, Sallie Graves' career began in a different industry. Out of school, despite offers from consultancies, Graves took a mainframe programmer position at Milliken & Co., a private textile company. Six months into the job, one of the company's largest textile carpet facilities burned down. Because Graves worked on all of the Milliken's back-office systems, the company sent Graves to the site. "I was sent to help out with the rebuild effort and the insurance claims, determining what inventory was in the building when it burned and coming up with scenarios with the accountants," she says.
The company rebuilt the plant in eight months and implemented all new technology. While Graves spent a few months onsite working on the insurance claim, the company decided to implement a planning and scheduling system and moved Graves into the business side for a year. Graves ended up working at Milliken for five years, and she says the lessons learned were necessary.
Hesitantly, Graves moved on to consulting at PeopleSoft. "I needed to make an industry change so I did go into consulting, the one thing I didn't want to do out of college. I went to work for PeopleSoft, and they were trying to build their supply chain products at the time, but I also had a lot of background in financial systems. I helped them build the practice while consulting on financial systems."
On an integration project assignment in 2000, Graves worked with ING during its acquisition of Aetna Financial Services and ReliaStar. After Graves finished the projects, ING called her back to offer her a permanent position. The past nine years at ING-where she currently is Head of Insurance and Distributed Services IT-have been fast moving, from both a professional and personal view. "I had two kids-now two and five years old," she says. "They keep me grounded. I don't think I could have accelerated my career to the level I have without having kids. Before, I wasn't a good delegator, but after having my children, I had to rely on my team. I had to build strong teams and be a strong leader."
That leadership has played out in different roles at ING. Graves started working with cost managers across the country in ING's finance and HR areas on back-office applications.
Three years ago, Graves had the chance to enter new territory-become a divisional CIO of a life insurance division. "This opportunity came up to get into a line of business," she says. "I had been in back office the whole time and though I have no life insurance background, I looked at what I could offer the division. At that time they had just purchased and had implemented a package application for their policy admin system. I had a lot of experience in packaged applications and thought 'I have to do this.'"
ING had approximately 4,000 policies on the system when Graves joined the group, and they were still trying to convert policies from older systems-about 10,000 to 17,000 policies a year, mostly universal life and variable universal life. So the challenges were plentiful. "Feeding the peripheral systems that are around that old system and getting those systems to scale was a pretty big deal," she says. "We were able to accomplish that. We were doubling or tripling our volume on the system every month and we got up to around 250,000 policies a year now at term."
