Innovation

We recognize that the world is evolving quickly. While our long-term financial strategy is not changing, the competitive advantages that have fueled our success over the last decade will not necessarily be the same as those we will need to continue to lead for the next decade. That is the focus of our ambitious innovation agenda: making sure that our competitive advantages are as relevant and differentiating tomorrow as they are today. Ultimately, the vision for our innovation agenda is to be the undeniable choice for the customer and an indispensable partner for our agents and brokers.

Approach

As one of the United States’ largest multiline insurers, we continually invest in data, analytics, technology and operations to make our processes more efficient and effective to better serve our customers and maintain our competitive edge. Our competitive advantages set Travelers apart; they are foundational to the success of our long-term financial strategy. Nonetheless, we understand clearly that the world is changing, and changing quickly. Broadly speaking, we see four significant forces of change impacting our industry.

Forces of change

We are pursuing an ambitious innovation agenda that is focused intently on these forces of change and is designed to ensure that our competitive advantages remain relevant and differentiating to drive our long-term success.

We believe the winners in our industry will be those with deep domain expertise who can continue to deliver industry-leading results while innovating successfully on top of a foundation of excellence. To ensure that we keep pace with the accelerating rate of demographic, economic, technological, environmental and societal changes in today’s consumer and business environment, we have adopted a focused approach to innovation as a business discipline. Our Chief Innovation Officer leads a dedicated team of innovation specialists who focus on championing and supporting experimentation across the enterprise and enable connections to new capabilities in external ecosystems.

At the same time, our Technology & Operations teams, led by our Chief Technology & Operations Officer, are also actively engaged in our ambitious innovation agenda by driving our digital transformation and advanced data and analytics initiatives. As we scale our agile practices across the organization, including through cross-functional groups, we continue to reinforce our leading position in the industry. We are also deeply committed to modernizing our technology architecture to enable us to continue delivering new business capabilities at scale – driving our performance today and positioning us for the future.

Our “perform and transform” call to action, discussed in our Chairman and CEO’s message, and our culture of innovation have become important parts of our DNA. Our collaborative approach to innovation helps us “focus on the future” by bringing an innovative mindset to everything we do, forging strategic internal and external partnerships and accelerating new ideas with speed and direction – or, as we refer to it internally, “innovating with velocity.”

We are pursuing innovation in service of our vision to be the undeniable choice for the customer and an indispensable partner for our agents and brokers. In support of that vision, we have three innovation priorities:

• Extend our advantage in risk expertise. We have been a leading property casualty insurer over many years by being excellent at understanding risk and the products and services our customers need to manage their risk. Core to that is our ability to balance the science and art of risk-based decision-making based on data and analytics. That skill set requires a combination of deep expertise and a special culture that values collaboration and long-term success. It is an important competitive advantage developed over a long period of time and one we believe is very difficult to replicate. We seek to extend our advantage by investing in areas such as predictive modeling, advanced analytics, robotic process automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence and new innovative solutions.
• Provide great experiences for our customers, agents and brokers. We are laser-focused on providing great experiences for our customers, distribution partners and employees. We are investing in technologies, capabilities, and talent to become faster, nimbler, more digital, more mobile and more personalized. When we think there is a proprietary advantage, we invest in building these capabilities ourselves. In other cases, we partner with, invest in or acquire organizations – both established businesses and startups – to bring these great experiences to market more efficiently. Both approaches have resulted in new and enhanced capabilities, such as on-demand certificates of insurance for Small Commercial accounts, ongoing improvement to our self-service web experience, a completely redesigned mobile app, virtual home and auto inspections, nurses making virtual visits, loss consultation and digital claim payments, to name a few.
• Optimize productivity and efficiency. We are continually working to optimize our productivity and efficiency to enhance our operating leverage. This is not just about tightening the belt; it is about bringing a real strategic lens to the way we think about how we do what we do in an effort to do more with less. Enhanced operating leverage provides us with the flexibility to let the savings fall to the bottom line, reinvest the savings and/or compete on price without compromising our return objectives.