USAA's Jennifer Kyung aspires to 'seamless' underwriting: Women in Insurance Leadership 2022

Underwriting is a crucial function of insurance, and after 30 years in the business, Jennifer Kyung is transforming its possibilities.

As VP and chief underwriter for USAA, Kyung leads a team of 270 employees and 450 contractors not just on day-to-day tasks, but also in modernizing underwriting for the digital age, elevating its profile throughout the insurance organization.

“I created the underwriting of the future vision, and we laid out North Stars for underwriting and key tenets,” Kyung says. “That was developed to provide inspiration not just internally to our team, but externally, to get others excited about what underwriting was bringing to the table.”

Digital innovations have delivered revolutionary capabilities across underwriting. For USAA, Kyung has drawn on her experience to integrate things like artificial intelligence, aerial imagery, and third-party data into the underwriting organization in order to bolster the company’s customer experience.

Underwriting is increasingly about “knowing our members through data and analytics so that we understand their exposure, and bringing unique insights and thoughts around how we mitigate risk and how we manage our exposure more broadly,” she explains. “Our aspirational goal is seamless underwriting. We don’t even want the member to even know they’re being underwritten – we just want them to have a great experience and end up with a policy. That’s reliant on third-party data and better models.”

Kyung’s transformational groundwork has set USAA’s underwriting organization up for success in an increasingly challenging environment. Inflation is showing up in supply and replacement costs, but also in increasing lawsuits in some states, and catastrophe management scenarios are being upended by environmental change. 

“I’ve been in the underwriting world for almost 30 years, and I’ve never experienced anything like what we’re going through right now,” she says. “So we’re constantly trying to optimize how we spend our capital around these types of investments, so that we’re spending our members’ money wisely and optimizing so that we get to a quality outcome. Internally our underwriters really like it because they feel that they can be spending their time on the most complex accounts and the most complex scenarios.”

While underwriting transforms from a capability and technology perspective, Kyung says there’s an opportunity for emerging leaders – especially women – to step up and take on leadership roles by demonstrating an understanding of that transformation.

“Because underwriting is becoming more focused on data and analytics, what we’ve been doing on our team for underwriting is having some of our up and coming female leaders get more involved in that [technology] space and being very deliberate about their development,” she says. “Underwriting of the future is going to look really different, and if you’re on the ground learning it and becoming that subject matter expert, people are going to look to you.”

To that end, Kyung has started an underwriting mentorship program, reaching out to women and minorities across insurance functions to bring them into the fold, prioritizing one-on-one time. People who have worked with her describe her as “supportive and empathetic,” “willing to listen,” and “inclusive.”

“We’re actually reaching out to the insurance sales and service organization, and claims, and providing these quick mentoring episodes with them,” she says. 

Outside USAA, Kyung serves on the board of ACORD and as chairperson of the Insurance Information Institute. She says those organizations can also do more to encourage more diversity in the insurance industry, including bringing a stronger pipeline into insurance by partnering with different colleges and universities.”

“The CEO of Triple I [Sean Kevelighan] and I have talked about bringing diversity to the board of directors and to the membership overall, and how we leverage the power of Triple I in our partnerships to bring more diversity into insurance in general,” she says. “I’m really proud to be the first female chief underwriting officer at USAA. I like being that role model for others where others can say that’s achievable.”