AIG American General’s Carlson Makes Innovation a Core Competency

AIG American General's Jeff Carlson makes sure that IT keeps core operations running while also enabling the life and annuities carrier to innovate and grow.

Challenging business conditions often cause companies to put the brakes on innovation. Under the direction of EVP and CIO Jeff Carlson, however, innovation is becoming a core competency at Houston-based AIG American General. Carlson has headed the life and annuity insurer's Center of Innovation since it was launched last year. "We expect it will help us identify and incubate, or bring forward, some real business opportunities -- things that have measurable return [and] can generate real growth," Carlson explains.

Another goal is to foster a "culture of collaboration," in Carlson's words, throughout AIG American General. This is a dramatic change for a life insurer, he concedes, emphasizing that it depends as much on culture and strategy as it does on technologies such as wikis. In fact, Carlson notes, one of the reasons AIG American General president and CEO Matt Winter asked Carlson to head this initiative is that, "because of where I am in the organization, I'm probably less inclined to be married to the way things are done today, and perhaps be a little bit more of a catalyst to encourage others to think differently and to approach ... existing solutions and look at them differently."

Thinking differently about how to grow and support the business has been a theme of Carlson's approach to running AIG American General's 450-person IT organization. It's a given that IT's mission is to support the company's businesses, he notes. "Most of what we deliver is obviously in the form of systems and technology, but we also work very closely with the businesses in nontechnology areas — process flows, product design and product management," Carlson relates. [Ed. note: At press time in early October, the mid-September $85 billion Federal Reserve loan to rescue parent company AIG, which acquired American General in 2001, had not resulted in any organizational changes at AIG American General or in Carlson's responsibilities. On Oct. 3 AIG announced it would refocus on its core P&C business and intends to sell man of its other businesses in an effort to repay the outstanding balance on the loan.]

As the needs of both policyholders and distributors in the life and annuities business are evolving, opportunities are created for different kinds of services, products and product combinations, Carlson adds. "While a lot of what we've done historically will serve us well in the near term, we have to be creative in terms of, what are those product and service combinations? What are the new capabilities that we need to create technically?" he comments.

Self-service is one such capability, according to Carlson. "That's an example of an area that we believe is going to significantly change our industry," he says. "And it's one [in which] we think our consumers are judging us — not how we do against our competitors, but how we do against companies such as Amazon" that excel in self-service.

Carlson points out that while self-service definitely provides efficiencies for a carrier, it has evolved into a "must-have" offering. For distributors, the ability to provide information about application status, commissions or licensing "gives them information they need in a way that they can get it," he explains. On the consumer side, while the company has enabled self-service for basic functions such as address or beneficiary changes, the focus increasingly is on areas such as providing policy information.

Enabling Multichannel

According to Carlson, distribution has been "probably the single biggest area of focus in investment for us ... in the past 10 years." Much of this investment has been geared toward finding ways to meet the complex needs of a multichannel distribution organization. For example, the company has been working on providing its career field force with handheld pen-based tablet devices "through which they can conduct the full range of business," Carlson reports.

Ease of doing business has been the focus on the independent agent and broker side, he adds. "What we've tried to do is accelerate or automate the submission-to-commission process so that they want to do business with us because we can do it faster, quicker and more consistently," Carlson says.

Katherine Burger is Editorial Director of Bank Systems & Technology and Insurance & Technology, members of UBM TechWeb's InformationWeek Financial Services. She assumed leadership of Bank Systems & Technology in 2003 and of Insurance & Technology in 1991. In addition to ... View Full Bio