5 Questions with Jai Kumar

Welcome to the first installment of 5 Questions, a new blog series where a team member from Xceedance shares their insights on important trends in insurance, technology, and business while also sharing a bit about themselves and their life outside of work.

For this first installment of 5 Questions we spoke with Jainendra (Jai) Kumar, a new addition to the Xceedance team. Jai joined the Digital Transformation Unit in April 2022 and brings 20 years of expertise in technology, products, and software to the company.

Q1: Jai, you recently joined Xceedance as VP of Product Engineering in the company’s Digital Transformation Unit. What attracted you to the role and Xceedance?

Jai: With the deep expertise and domain knowledge at Xceedance there is an incredible opportunity to create value through product offerings that can improve internal insurance operations and customer engagements. With more than two decades of product experience playing all roles in technology and product, I see an opportunity to contribute to the product journey and positively impact the overall technology capabilities at Xceedance. 

Q2: What is your primary goal for your first year with the company?

Jai: This year I’m working toward defining and starting to implement the product, program, and engineering excellence journeys. The Digital Transformation Unit as a whole is working to strengthen the platform and product suite approach, along with cloud and data engineering capabilities improving speed-to-value for our customers.    

Q3: What do you see as the greatest potential for technology to redefine the insurance industry?

Jai: I think insurtech is where the larger banking, financial services, and insurance sector was 5 years ago – We can expect rapid cloud migration, and cloud-native architecture adoption as the value that the insurance industry can derive from data is much higher compared to BFSI broadly. I also see the potential adoption of distributed ledger technology along with AI/ML in reinsurance and settlement use cases. These technology trends would improve insurance operations, enable faster decision-making, lead to better use of additional data sources, establish smart contracts between insurers, and more. All these technology adoptions would improve the overall customer experience.  

Q4: How should insurance organizations be leveraging their data that they are not presently?

Jai: Data has always been the cornerstone of the insurance business as decisions are made based on data. Now we have an opportunity to provide customized experiences to the customers while improving efficiency using data-driven enterprise expertise with connected data flows through the insurance process. I see additional data points, like real-time IoT feeds, being used to assess risk more frequently based on field data which would intern provide enhanced value to the customers and better information on which to base decisions for underwriters and carriers.

 Q5: Xceedance puts a large emphasis on learning and development for its team members. What do you see as the value of L&D in the modern workplace?

Jai: Creating an innovative workplace requires great talent and collaboration across the organization. We need to constantly attract, retain, and upgrade new talent. Continual learning through a robust L&D program plays a key role in creating a learning culture.   

Thanks to Jai Kumar for sharing his thoughts and watch for the next installment of 5 Questions with Jason Caravella, VP of claims TPA operations, coming soon!