By Michaela Platt, Communications Coordinator, Triple-I
As companies began incorporating Internet methods and operations, Casey Kempton had simply begun her graduate research in cognitive anthropology and was working for a tech startup. A Connecticut native, Kempton had at all times been conscious of insurance coverage giants based mostly in her state.
So, when the startup she labored for went out of enterprise, a profession with their insurance coverage pilot buyer, The Hartford, appeared a pure match. She utilized for a place of their e-business ventures unit and has labored in roles throughout the insurance coverage trade ever since.
“When I first came into the industry and began learning about exactly what our product does and how it benefits consumers, I had this sense that both agents and consumers could expect more from their carriers,” stated Kempton, who’s now president of non-public traces at Nationwide.
To Kempton, this meant occupied with stopping or minimizing claims, along with optimizing the end-to-end expertise with the product. The curiosity and drive for innovation that marked Kempton’s early profession propelled her to patent two dwelling insurance coverage danger ranking options.
“A small group of us wanted to take the concept of early auto telematics and apply it to property, anticipating a future where the internet was pervasive and everything was connected,” Kempton stated. “We explored how this could impact real-time rating, monitoring, and response for homeowners.”
Kempton leads all elements of the enterprise, together with product, underwriting, gross sales and distribution, claims and companies. She beforehand was government vice chairman and digital enterprise officer at Chubb and hung out with ACE Group, accountable for international private and business traces and main operations and information know-how for Latin America.
The consequence was an invention Kempton helped create whereas nonetheless in her early twenties: a closed-loop system that senses, underwrites, and costs property danger in actual time whereas additionally providing remediation companies. The system has now been patented for practically 20 years.
Despite this promising begin, Kempton confronted obstacles on this historically male-dominated discipline. Even as she rose into management roles, some challenges endured.
“There are times where I may have traveled to visit agents or partners in different parts of the country and realized that expectations on the roles that women could hold versus men were quite different,” she stated. “I had several experiences where it was assumed I was the note-taker for the meeting when, in fact, I was the boss or the most senior person there.”
Despite the challenges, Kempton has discovered her profession as a girl in management to be extremely rewarding and is grateful for the mentorship and sponsorship alongside the way in which.
“I had two really important mentor-sponsors in my career, both of whom were men, both of whom created opportunities for me that, on my own, I might have struggled to have,” she stated.
Kempton has labored to type alliances and a assist construction with each women and men within the trade. She has additionally discovered herself in phases of her profession the place she was with no mentor and needed to community and construct new relationships. She emphasizes the significance of leaning into widespread floor and constructing bonds with coworkers whereas additionally establishing practices that amplify all voices on the desk.
“If you contribute something and then one of your male counterparts takes credit for it five minutes later, nobody says anything,” she stated. “Everybody heard you and they know you said it, but we don’t have a practice of saying, ‘Right, that’s the idea Casey just shared. Thank you for pointing that out.’”
Kempton stated a number of vivid, succesful, pushed girls assert themselves – solely to be labeled “difficult”, “aggressive”, and “hard to work with”. That is one thing she has coached a number of girls on by her profession.
Kempton additionally addressed the pay hole and the unstated drawbacks girls can face for taking day without work to have youngsters.
“I still have these stress dreams,” she stated. “I know I’m stressed about something when I have this dream, and it’s that I’m pregnant again. And my goodness, what is that going to do to the rest of my career? How am I going to manage that? To me, this correlates to the pay challenge because my career paused with the birth of each of my children.”
Kempton is obsessed with addressing the pay hole within the insurance coverage trade, however acknowledges that there is no such thing as a straightforward reply.
“Each manager must make a personal commitment to say, ‘I can’t tell them how their pay may compare to others, but I can work to address it over time,’” she stated. “We can work to fix it every year until men and women are on par. We can create awareness with managers that they have some control over how we address that pay gap.”
Meanwhile, girls executives like Casey Kempton proceed to interrupt obstacles. Her journey highlights the facility of innovation, perseverance, and the significance of mentorship and allyship. From her early days at The Hartford to her management position at Nationwide, Kempton’s story is a testomony to the influence one particular person can have.
“For me, leadership has been incredibly rewarding,” stated Kempton. “The best advice I can give to young women starting out is to be curious. Expose yourself early on to as much as you can contextually and then become an expert in something. Being more intentional about how you navigate where you want to go, that’s when you’ll go far.”