With $41 billion in annual revenues, Travelers has more than 30,000 employees, 15,000 agents and brokers, and operations in the US, Canada, and Europe. Traveler Executive Vice President and Chief Technology and Operations Officer Mojgan Lefebvre shares insights about fostering a culture of innovation at one of the industry's largest and most successful companies. She also reveals a personal narrative of remarkable resilience.
Joining Travelers in 2018 with over two decades of experience leading employee- and customer-facing technology operations for large insurers, Lefebvre has an expansive portfolio of responsibilities. Chief among them is driving an ambitious transformation agenda centered on making innovation part of Travelers' DNA. To achieve this, Lefebvre established three strategic pillars designed to empower employees to create best-in-class, digital-first customer experiences.
The first of these pillars is the incorporation of design thinking into development processes. This agile, customer-centric approach to innovation starts with the users' needs and works backward from there—iterating based on user feedback. The second pillar involved the development of a strategic architecture for driving modernization and simplification wherever possible. According to McKinsey, successful insurers will increasingly be those that automate mundane processes, embrace omni-channel distribution, and simplify their product portfolios using a common IT platform.
"All of this really required, I would say, a cloud-native, much more composable, API- and microservices-driven platform that would be scalable, allow us to have flexibility, and more than anything, drive much more nimbleness and speed to market," she says in a recent episode of the InsurTalk podcast series, adding that the company's existing legacy systems wouldn't suffice. "We had no choice but to really consider modernizing our policy administration and billing and other platforms, and that something like Guidewire would be critical [to] our ability to drive these imperatives."
Another key element of her efforts is the company's new Travelers Tech innovation hub for engineering, artificial intelligence, and data science focused on creating customer-centric, digital-first solutions. Opened in 2024, the hub is a stone's throw from Lefebvre's undergraduate alma mater, Georgia Tech.
After spending her career at the intersection of business and technology, Lefebvre has said, "I love nothing more than solving business challenges and applying the right teams and technologies." Indeed, it's especially pertinent given the headwinds the industry faces on that score. So it's not surprising that her third pillar focuses on what she views as an advantage multiplier: attracting and retaining the talent needed to achieve engineering excellence.
Even with clarity of vision, none of this will be easy. But Lefebvre knows a thing or two about persistence. In her interview with InsurTalk, she shares a personal backstory that includes leaving her family in Iran at the age of 19 and making her way across six different countries before earning a bachelor's degree in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and an MBA from Harvard Business School and then climbing to the upper echelons of our industry. Listen to the full interview here.