Executive Insights: Vertafore CTO Liz Nguyen
What did this insurance technologist learn from previous work in several high-profile industries? Learn to trust your gut.
Vertafore, the insurance-technology provider, recently announced the appointment of the company’s first female chief technology officer (CTO), Liz Nguyen.
As nice as it is to be first, however, Nguyen says that what makes her right for the role has little to do with gender and everything to do with the two decades she spent developing software for a series of highly-regulated industries. The “secret sauce,” adds Nguyen, who first joined Vertafore in 2019 as vice president of product development, is her ability to build relationships across an organization.
PropertyCasualty360.com recently caught up with Nguyen, who hails from Chicago but now lives in Colorado, to find out more about how she bridges software engineering with industry-specific insights to provide clients with the right technology solutions for their unique business needs.
PC360: Tell us a bit about yourself?
Liz Nguyen: I grew up and went to school in Chicago. After I graduated, I moved to the East Coast and worked in consulting. I was focused on building out software for the federal government and the public welfare sector. Then, after traveling a bit, I ended up joining a startup and building out software for the energy industry, which was going through a huge amount of deregulation at the time. We had to build out a bunch of new software to adhere to those new rules. From there, I moved into building out software for the oil and gas industry. And now, I’m building out software for the insurance industry.
PC360: What was the most valuable piece of career advice you ever received?
Nguyen: Trust your gut.
PC360: What would you say are the most common misconceptions of insurance, and how can insurance professionals work to combat these misconceptions?
Nguyen: As I mentioned, I worked in the oil and gas industry right before I joined Vertafore. One of the things that I knew about the oil and gas industry is that a lot of the companies were very slow in terms of adopting new technologies. They also were encountering workforce change, with a lot of people retiring and a new generation coming in. So when I first joined Vertafore, and I was learning about the insurance industry, one of the first things somebody told me was that a lot of insurance companies are slow to adopt new technologies. As I started experiencing it, yes, they are slow. But definitely not like oil-and-gas slow. It’s not that (insurance organizations) are slow to adopt new technologies; they’re actually looking for the value in these new technologies.
PC360: What do you think are the top issues facing today’s insurers?
Nguyen: What I hear in my role now talking to customers is that they want us to go faster. They want us to make things more streamlined so they can actually focus on what they want to do, which is build relationships with their clients and carriers.
PC360: Where would you say the insurance business is on the spectrum of digital transformation?
Nguyen: I think they’re on the verge. Some are very eager to adopt, especially some of our bigger customers. They’re looking to consolidate processes. They’re looking to find simplified, automated, end-to-end workflows. They want OCR (or optical character recognition) technology to be able to quickly read in-depth pages. These are all things that they’re asking for; a platform to bring all their data together so they can do a lot of data mining. They want to solve problems, and they’re willing to use technology in order to solve those problems. And then there’s the other end of the spectrum. They need a simple solution: ‘I have two, three, four or five users.’ They want (technology) to be simple with low overhead and maintenance.
PC360: How do you think today’s insurance businesses can forge a strong corporate culture with so many employees working remotely?
Nguyen: That is a struggle. I always want to be authentic and genuine with people. I am not successful unless my people are successful. But what I find has always been important, regardless of whether we are in the office working together or working remotely, is actually connecting people, connecting teams, with our overall mission.
PC360: What advice do you have for rising insurance professionals?
Nguyen: The same as before: Trust your gut.
PC360: That’s not always easy for someone who is just learning the ropes.
Nguyen: Sure, you always have doubts. You wonder if you’re second-guessing yourself. A lot of it comes from experience. But any failure is a learning experience that actually builds your gut and tunes your antennae. It also helps to have someone who you can use as a sounding board. You don’t have to do it all on your own.
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