The Top-Level Priority for Insurance CIOs in 2024 With Bill Cassidy from New York Life

Rob GalbraithAnd, we're excited to be back here. We're launching another year of the InsurTech Geek podcast. I'm your host in flying solo today, Rob Galbraith. And, I'm thrilled to have with us, Bill Cassidy from New York Life. Welcome, Bill. Thank you very much for having me, Rob. So, so thrilled to have you on, and and we'll definitely get into, you know, your current role at New York Life and kind of your outlook and and thoughts on the role of CIO and priorities and so much obviously going on in kind of the Intrutech and innovation space in a few minutes.

But as we typically do on the show, I really just want to start with getting to know you a little bit and have you share your background and with our guests so they can understand a little bit about yourself, your background, your career and how you arrived at the position you are today. So first and foremost, why don't you kind of tell us where you're coming from us today? And then where did you grow up and what did you wanna do for a career when you were a kid?

Great.

Bill CassidyWell, again, thanks very much for having me. I'm broadcasting today from our office here in New York City. But I live on Long Island, New York with my wife and three beautiful daughters, so blessed in that regard. Surprisingly, when I was a young person, I was not aspiring to be a CIO of an insurance company. I had different aspirations. I was certainly a bit of a gym rat, Rob. I loved the game of basketball and traveled around the country and, you know, was lucky enough to receive a division two scholarship and play at university.

So there was a moment in time where I thought I could play professionally, but that quickly faded away in the background realizing that, you know, I just wasn't as big and strong as I should have. But to this date, I'm a very loyal New York Knicks fan, and I sort of channel that love that way. In terms of my professional career, I've been doing this financial services and technology thing for the better part of thirty two, thirty three years. Started my career in 1992 after graduating undergraduate degree in computer mathematics and economics.

So I I actually do for a living what I studied, which is sort of odd these days. I started my career at Goldman Sachs, as I said, as a software engineer, like many early technologists. And you go back to the early nineties, it probably wouldn't be surprising. I first foray into development was on Cobalt mainframes, quickly moved into more client server based applications and had the opportunity to work in various departments across Goldman Sachs and learn basically learn the business. After about seven years there, I had a very unique opportunity to head out West and work for a small asset management company in California.

And everyone needs to live in California at one point in their life. So that was a fun life experience as well. And after two years there, I sort of had a one of the major parts of my career was joining BlackRock back here in New York where I spent fifteen years. Over that fifteen year timeline, I had a multitude of roles, quasi technology, software engineering was very critical in the Aladdin trading system development, but also focused on enterprise data at the company. Then after leaving Goldman Sachs, I had a two year stint at a publicly traded hedge fund here in New York, which is always interesting working at, a hedge fund.

The pace and the energy that those companies have are hard to miss. And that was my first opportunity to sort of take the big seat to become the CIO at that hedge fund, which was clearly a big learning. And then I joined the New York Life family in March 2018, So six years coming up. And I've been very fortunate here, Rob. I've held the multitude of posts. I landed at New York Life as a divisional CIO, overseeing our investments technology area. So are the teams that support our general account as well as our externally facing asset management business.

And then after some opportunities and some other things being added to the portfolio, when my predecessor retired, in 2021, was named CIO. So I've been in the post now for three years or so. Interesting. You had this amazing career opportunity handed to you. And of course, I was announced as a new CIO on April Fool's Day, which you really can't make up. And I guess I guess the joke is still on. I'm still here, and, we we have some really great stuff happening here at New York Life, so it's, it's a really exciting time.

Yeah. That's fantastic. Thanks for for walking us through that. And,

Rob Galbraithyeah, it's interesting on on basketball. My kid's definitely not good enough to play in college, but my son is 19. He's a freshman at LSU, so he he played basketball ever since his kindergarten, and I remember he was on the, the b team in, middle school. And so as he went to high school, you know, he wanted to play. And I told him, I was like, unfortunately, you've inherited my athletic genes, which means you're short and slow and and can't jump very high. And, you've gotta be either, you know, tall or pretty skilled, to be, you know, good at at at basketball.

And so he really put in the work, you know, with the coach and eventually made it to to Varcy, and that's that the team did really well. Now they ended up they made the playoffs, but they they lost to I think it was the number three ranked team in the state of Texas. So at the same year, the girls team won the state championship actually for the first time for, his high school. Yeah. Which is pretty pretty exciting. So Well, I tell you this.

Bill CassidyI was gonna say there's many ways that one could get it, but, you know, the experience of working on a team, you know, it certainly translates into the professional field too. So even though your son didn't make the NBA, I'm sorry. He learned some stuff that'll help him in his future career. Well, it's interesting. So he he, you know, he definitely still plays, you know, rec league type stuff, whatever, but he's really gotten into ultimate Frisbee

Rob Galbraithat LSU. And and so there's not a a, you know, varsity team, but there is a club team, they play a lot of the other SEC schools. And he just asked me to pay for his his, you know, uniform. He's got a schedule to come on whatever. So I kinda joke with, Jane Daniels winning the Heisman in New York City this past week, right, from the LSU quarterback. I kinda said to him, like, oh, what's the Heisman equivalent in ultimate Frisbee kind of tongue in cheek?

And he texted back and he said, think it's called the Callahan. I was like, I didn't know there was such a thing as the Heisman trophy of ultimate Frisbee. But I guess there is. Yeah. So anyway, well, you know, I'm I'm curious you mentioned, know, obviously kind of East Coaster. Right? Grew up on a Long Island. You live on Long Island, but you mentioned your time out West. So and you mentioned kind of in passing, right? Like, it's a good experience. So just quickly, I would love to hear your kind of thoughts of what that experience was like and what maybe some of your key takeaways were when you had that kind of change in perspective,

Bill Cassidywith your time out West. Yeah. You know, financial services, at least my experience, financial services companies outside of the island of Manhattan have a little bit of a different cultural feel, perhaps a little bit more balanced, work life balance a little bit easier, but certainly very focused, you know, on career objectives and sort of company outcomes. For me, just moving out to California was just a different cultural experience, the sunny weather and going to the beach. You had those opportunities in the LA area that you could in the wintertime, you could snow ski in the morning and then go to the beach in the afternoon.

So we we took advantage of plenty of those, opportunities. And you have to get you have to get comfortable of waking up very early, Rob, because the market's still open at the regular time. But with the time difference, you know, you find yourself on the highway, you know, 03:45 in the morning driving to work, but you have the opportunity to be on the golf course at, you know, three in the afternoon. So it was an interesting experience, and I, I'm certainly glad that I did it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some some early mornings for sure, but I guess you're beating the LA traffic a little bit by by doing it that way. But yeah. You do not you do not wanna be driving through LA in rush hour. It's not a Yeah. Not a good thing. Definitely not. Yeah.

Rob GalbraithDefinitely not. Well, we'll bring it back to to today. So, you know, maybe for our audience, just talk about what are some of the key responsibilities that you have as CIO at New York Life and overseeing enterprise technology for obviously one of the largest life insurers globally?

Bill CassidyYou know, the title chief information officer, my experience means slightly different things to different companies and different people. When I try to explain what I do to a living for a living to my wife and my kids, I I usually use some form of a joke that everything in a building that has power that's not a light bulb ultimately is my responsibility. And and breaking that down a little bit, certainly all of infrastructure for New York Life, so all of our data centers, compute, networking, telephony, help desk, etcetera.

We're very focused on protecting New York Life and the data of our customers and agents. Cybersecurity and the work that we do that to protect the companies directly within my remit. Enterprise data, New York Life is very heavily focused to be a data driven organization and to provide customized, personalized experiences for our customers and our agents. Enterprise data is a huge focus for us. And then of course, you have the engineering teams that face off with our business partners to build and develop and integrate capabilities that run the company every day from sales and marketing opportunities to build new products, to servicing customers and agents and all that.

That is where you get into the traditional software engineering and integration and etc. And then a company of our size and a technology group of our size, it's sort of running a small country. So we have a office of the CIO where I have a chief operating officer that helped me run the group, deals the finances of the department and resource management, risk management, issue management, things along those lines. So it's sort of the all in job. Some ways, that's terrifying that the whole thing is yours.

But frankly, having domain over all of it really gives us the scale and the oversight and the power to move the needle on the things that matter most for the company. And it's really exciting. The company recognizes, I'm sure we'll get into the rest of the podcast that, you know, technology is so critical, to not only what we're doing here at New York Life, but everyday life for, you know, citizens, across this great country. So we're really excited to be a part of it. Yeah. No.

Really appreciate the overview. And, yeah, I mean, it's so,

Rob Galbraithvast, the responsibilities of a CIO. I think that's what's, harsh. Somebody that's been really on the business side my whole career and obviously worked with CIOs and and folks on that side and and know how important they are, but yet, you know, not having to worry about or keeping the lights on all the infrastructure, whatever, like, of the the luxury, right, of of a lot of that is I don't have to worry about the plumbing, right Yes. In terms the infrastructure, everything in in you do in your your seat.

So I definitely appreciate there's a whole lot lot of stuff you you don't see from a business perspective that is still critical, right, for the organization.

Bill CassidyThe amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to keep the lights on every day, like gravity is not to be underestimated. When you have complicated systems and multiple SaaS providers and cybersecurity, bad actors trying to do nefarious things at every hour of every day. A lot of people work really hard to protect the company, and we really do a fantastic job. Reminds me, and you were saying that, to my bond math days when I was at BlackRock, there was this term that, like, that job is negatively convexed, like there's only downside.

Like, you don't want to be in technology when people realize who you are when there's a problem. So part of my job is I like to be a little bit on the quiet side because things are working smoothly and everything is up and running. But we're really focused on engaging deeply with our business partners to facilitate innovation and the way in which we build our systems and interface with our customers. That part, I'm more than happy to be in the spotlight for. Yeah. No. Really appreciate that.

And and you're right. Unfortunately, it's one of those that

Rob Galbraithperfection is par for the course. Right? That's the expectation. Right. And then when everything does go wrong, right, to your point, it's like that's when people start learning the names of you and the folks in your organization. So so, yeah, that that can be a challenging position for sure. So, Bill, you've mentioned that, our crack research staff at the InsurTech podcast dug up a a interview that you've previously given that New York Life is in the middle of a multiyear strategy to modernize your technology infrastructure and application.

That that plan is focused on three key areas, cloud computing, cybersecurity,

Bill Cassidyand data management. So I would love for you to just share a little bit more on that and kind of expand for our listeners and viewers. Yeah, I'd be happy to. And I'm sure folks listening to this podcast would probably agree with me that it's a it's really exciting time to be a technologist these days. It's just an explosion of innovation that's happening around us. But to be a technologist at New York Life is even more special because we are attempting and very successfully embracing this explosion of technology to modernize the company.

And we're doing this really in a very healthy way in lockstep with our business partners and with the support of our executive management team down to really drive transformation at the company. And when I mentioned those comments in another forum about those three areas of our strategy, what I was really referencing is this concept of having a healthy digital core. If you're aspiring as a company to provide best of breed experiences for your customers, for your prospects, for your agents, it's almost akin to building the walls on a house.

If you don't have a good foundation, the walls aren't going to stand very well. In our view, having modern infrastructure, meaning out of our locally maintained data centers and into the cloud in a modern way, embracing data as an asset and seeking ways to not only cleanse it and rationalize it, but to unlock the value of it, and then protecting the company from cybersecurity threats. Without that digital core, everything else starts, the house of cards proverbially starts falling. And even in the cybersecurity space where we focus on it, once you start moving your compute into the cloud and your edge moves outside, the historical comfort you would get with a robust firewall, it goes away.

Now your front line of defense are things like identity and access management. So there's this very interesting convergence of, as we're looking to modernize the company, the ways that we've protected the company, the ways that we've managed data has to evolve along with it. So we're trying to do that while simultaneously working with our business partners. And this is a really exciting part of the job. There's probably many examples where companies have technology organizations, and they're deemed as a necessary evil. And there are other companies that have technology organizations, and they're viewed as necessary enabler for the business strategy.

At New York Life, we're the latter. So we're trying to thread the needle, Rob, to sort of quickly establish this foundation, this digital core, while at the same time working on business partners to figure out ways to leapfrog the competition and create best of breed customer and agent experiences that all of us can be very proud for. So as you probably can imagine, it's a difficult balancing act, but you think we have it under control. That's what I was referencing when I talked about those three areas of our modernization journey.

I definitely want to get into some of those elements in a moment. You touched on the business alignment piece. So,

Rob GalbraithI know that that business alignment is is critical, is is, you know, essential in your role, and it can also be very challenging. I know very early in my career, Bill, like, one of the things that I had I think I had an analyst title, but essentially, I was almost like a translator. You know, I would meet with the Yes. You know, the actuarial team, the finance team, and others, and then I would meet with our kind of IT team. And I realized that these two groups, like, really don't have that much in common.

They don't have a common language. They don't have a common understanding. And so I I knew enough about each role just to be dangerous enough. So I wasn't a credentialed actuary and I definitely wasn't a, you know, certified database administrator or whatever, but yet I could help bring these two groups together to to to, you know, so that that that one could support the other and drive the business needs. So I'm just kind of curious, like, how do you and I feel like quite frankly, Bill, and you may disagree with this that, you know, many organizations I've been part of, like that gap between business and IC has almost only grown over time.

Because there are so many different partners. And so anyway,

Bill Cassidyyeah, just curious your thoughts on that. If an organization doesn't crack this code and bring those stakeholders together in a very healthy and productive way. That's the festering for $40,000,000 five year projects being deployed, and it's not doing what the end user ultimately wanted, and it's a big loss. This is the sort of stuff that ends people's careers and books are written about. So to me, that alignment, like I work pretty hard and sort of insist that we won't move forward with something until I observe that that alignment is clear and everyone's on the same page.

And we've taken some pretty interesting and strong steps, Rob, to ensure that here at New York Life. So, specifically, we've made some recent adjustments in both our operating model and our organizational structure here at the company, not just within technology, but within technology and the business in order to achieve what we're talking about right now. And that specifically is a previous alignment that used to be driven largely by product. So life, annuity, long term care, etc. And what was happening in those, in that operating model, that we would be developing and building sort of customer experiences in silos.

And if you were interfacing with New York Life, we'd feel as if you're interfacing with three different companies, because each product silo solve things its own way. We've reorganized technology and reorganized the business in more of a value stream construct, in the sense that now we have super teams of technology and business partners together in a single group whose responsibility is ensuring, for example, the application experience for our customers from the moment they agree to purchase a policy all the way through underwriting, through issuance, is done consistently across all product lines.

And we're doing that when, so the jerseys that are people, people aren't wearing technology jerseys and business jerseys, They're wearing the jersey of that value stream. And it's almost hard to tell, frankly, who the technologist is and who the business partner is, because everyone's uniquely aligned to the same set of outcomes. And it's been remarkable, the amount of friction that's come out of the system and the pure alignment. Those things are what usually makes projects go sideways. And we've we've, you know, taken some pretty big steps, and we're we're seeing some really interesting early returns.

Rob GalbraithThat's really great to hear, Bill. I I love that concept of kinda wearing the same jersey, and I would say that the teams that I've been a part of that were the most effective. That was very much you you couldn't necessarily tell what fiefdom, right, each person came from. Like, each had their own unique set of expertise and knowledge that they brought to it, but yet, you know, it was so highly collaborative, right, that you couldn't necessarily pigeonhole while you're part of, you know, this organization within the broad broader company and things like that.

So I I think that's a great analogy and and way to articulate that. So very quickly, you know, I wanted to ask, we'll look at ahead at 2024 in a minute here. But, you know, in the description of the strategy, it it seems to me it's like that old analogy of you're building the plane as you're flying it. Right? So you you have trains up and running. You have to worry about, you know, keeping that. Then you have to worry about, like, external threats from a cyber, but yet you also have to look forward for this modernization.

And then frankly, even going beyond when I think of modernization, sometimes I think of taking, you know, legacy tech, right, tech debt, maybe have built up like bring it back to current day standards, but almost distinct from being investing in the next ten years in the future. So I would just love your thoughts about how do you from if I'm thinking about right from you talking about asset management portfolio standpoint, how do you decide how much resources to invest in kind of the the keep the trains running, protect the house, modernization, then actually looking forward to the future, maybe some innovation type efforts?

Bill CassidyA wholesome answer to that could take an hour. I mean, that is incredibly complicated. And that's the dilemma that most large enterprises are trying to solve, right? I mean, you have multiple complicated problems happening simultaneously, each one individually very complicated in its own regard. So the secret sauce that we think will help us navigate that challenge is effectively twofold. Number one is really crisp planning around bringing together business architecture, technology architecture, and data architecture altogether. The end of the day, if we're all not on the same page, like for example, if our business partners want to wake up some new capability that's going to help our ultimate corporate strategy, well, how do you want to do that?

Are you going to partner with another company to whitelist the service? Are you going to buy a third party product to do that for you? Do you want me and my team to build it? These fundamental decisions have meaningful ramifications on the technology architecture that we're going need in order to achieve that, and then associated data. Once you start having a clear picture that everyone can point to, you print it up on a big screen, and you slap it all around the building, and everyone understands that to be your true north, then those other decisions about, okay, we have some technical debt in this pocket of the organization, what do we do about it?

Well, it's naturally going to be decommissioned as part of this future state architecture. So maybe we could ring fence it temporarily. Other pieces of it represent something that's going to persist and we need to invest. So in my humble view, absent that holistic end to end strategic strategy around business data and technology architecture, you by definition in some form of flail mode, and that's inherently dangerous. So you need to have that. And then number two, it's all about planning. You need to be highly organized. And whatever organizational construct you use, whether it's traditional waterfall project management with a PMO office, whether you lean into scaled agile or other more contemporary ways of working, sequencing that work in a very transparent way.

And you're not just scheduling the work within one team, you're very thoughtfully scheduling the work across teams so that interdependencies are understood. Admittedly, I would say the alignment with the business and the standing up of these value streams, we're very mature at mastering what I just described and walking that walk every single day is still a bit of a journey for us. But we're excited, and we think we're on the right track. And the frequency of projects being questioned of whether we should have started them, or the speed by which things get developed or a miss on the requirements versus what's delivered have dropped precipitously since we started adopting this model.

We feel very encouraged. I don't know if that makes sense. Absolutely.

Rob GalbraithYeah. No, I figured that it's good that you're even looking to those metrics, trying to capture those. And ultimately, you know, measuring, getting a sense of the alignment and how well that we did not do because I don't know that every organization does that. So I think that's that's critical in terms of moving fast, right, and not having that rework and just constant churn, basically where it's one step forward, two steps back. If

Bill Cassidyyou make a mistake with that too, you start losing some of the trust and credibility that you've earned with the business partners. Then the easy things become hard and the hard things become impossible, right? You need to kind of build that positive momentum and you're almost only as good as your last quarter of delivery. So we're really laser focused to consistently deliver with excellence and be very transparent because then it creates a much more healthy partnership and people feel comfortable to be in the proverbial canoe together.

So glad you mentioned that because I've actually had the

Rob Galbraithexperience in terms of leading innovation team where we kind of had a small pool of money, right, to make some small bets to answer some fundamental questions. Where when I started, the team was actually had several issues, several technologies that were in where I would describe maintenance mode. Like one, for example, was they had done some pilots with robotic process automation and they were stuck because they hadn't included their IT partners so they couldn't really scale it, right, and and make sure they got that blessing.

But yet they were worried, hey, we end this pilot, we unplug it, now we've got an unhappy business area that's come to rely on that technology. And so we had several examples where we were almost a shadow IT. Right? And so to your point, sometimes business partners when they don't feel like their CIO and the IT team is is responsive, they find workarounds. They find other ways that maybe in the short run, right, adds some productivity of a particular pain point, then the long run actually is counterproductive.

Bill CassidyCan I expand on that for a second? Totally Just maybe one more point, because I think this is one of the critical success factors as a technologist to really be welcomed and embraced by the business. And I've had this learning through my career, and it happened in other forums as well. If an individual has really creative, innovative ideas about fundamentally transforming some business process, a line of business, but production is down every day, or their systems issues or the cost of operationally running technology is out of control.

You're not going to be met with a positive reception when you speak to decision makers, because you seem as if you're missing the boat. The much better way to do it is to first get your own house in order, get production stability to an all time high, make it like gravity, bring your run costs down, improve culture in the company, drive innovation, hard work ethic, transparency, do what you say, say what you do, all that. And then what happens is instead of asking for an audience, people seek you out.

I say this to my children all the time, that they might get disappointed that they didn't get invited to a holiday party or a Christmas party. It's like, well, what could you be doing as an individual so that that person wouldn't have the party if you weren't available? Because that's a much more powerful way to do that. So I've taken that to heart. And certain business pockets of our organization that historically has leaned towards a little bit of a black market tech model, have now broken that down and are seeking actively our help and doing things the right way, which I think is a huge signal that we must be on to something positive.

Yeah. Yeah. That's tremendous. That's fantastic to hear. So looking forward, Bill, top

Rob Galbraithpriorities I'll I'll kind of make this a a two part question. So, know, in general, right, kind of knowing our audience, most of them probably don't work at New York Life. They work in other organizations. So just from a CIO's perspective broadly, what do you think are some top level priorities? And then secondarily, right, specific to you and your role at New York Life, what are your key priorities for 2024?

Bill CassidyYeah. You know, I it's it's interesting. Although things are moving very quickly, and they are, especially around generative AI, etc, which I'll talk about in a minute. There's also some common truths that I think are just persistent in this role that you need to focus on. For me, you know, not losing focus around resiliency for the company, you know, production support, disaster recovery, cybersecurity protection. We talked extensively so far around ensuring tight alignment with your business partners and making sure everyone's on the same page about what you're trying to deliver and what it is, and what it isn't.

Definitely in the insurance domain, we feel it here at New York Life, and I suspect that's true for other domains as well, that there is a huge desire to digitize and modernize experiences across a whole spectrum of avenues, and that costs money. So this creates an interesting dynamic that technologists are often going to be looked to find ways of doing more with less or more with the same at a minimum, not only within your own department and technology, which often is a sizable expense component of an overall enterprise, but how can the technology department offer cost efficiency opportunities within the business itself so that capital can be generated, capital can be preserved for more strategic initiatives?

So the combination of all that is, I think, persistent. It hasn't really changed meaningfully over the years. But in 2024, I think it's going to remain front and center. For us, in addition to everything we've already talked about, we had been, Rob, very, very purposeful about using generative AI not only to advance certain aspects of our business, but to use it as an illustrative fact about our intention around embracing modern technology, not just for our employees, but our customers and our agents. So the convergence of data management and generative AI in order to unleash value for us is going to be sort of the largest major new component to the broad categories of things that we're focused on in 2024.

And if I had a minute, I could tell me we've been on a pretty interesting journey. Probably about thirty seconds after ChatGPT hit the internet and our CEO got his hands on it. He very astutely called a few of us into the office and said, we need to do something about this. And we challenge ourselves to build and implement at least a few custom New York Life generative AI applications and put them out in the hands of our users before year end, which is a pretty aspirational goal considering the newness of the technology.

And we did not have the necessary infrastructure to do that on day one. And it's probably one of the more proud feathers in our cap that we've collectively achieved this. And we're going to have multiple generative AI custom built applications in the hands of different departments of our company to achieve a combination of improved sales into the field as well as operational efficiencies and departments like service. So it's pretty, pretty cool stuff. And as you probably can imagine, there's a long line out the door of business partners who are looking for cinema services.

So it's gonna be continued focus in 2024.

Rob GalbraithYeah. That's, it's exciting, right, technology. We talked about that, James and I, when we recorded our, kind of year end wrap up show, certainly, because I do think that was one of the big headliners for 2023. And, you know, it's probably it's hyperbole, maybe it's not. But I mean, it's almost like, you know, we've just discovered the Internet, right, or built the Internet. Right? And we're kinda starting out and figuring out, okay, we know what can we use this thing for? And I just feel like there's so many possibilities out there.

So we're at the tip of the iceberg. I mean, it's already remarkable what people have been able to to showcase and build and deploy. But I just know that we're, you know, a fraction, right, of what's star of the possibilities over the next five, ten years or more of using, generative AI. There's so many almost infinite possibilities.

Bill CassidyI mean, there's there's been many very prominent people making quotes like that, that this is as big as the Internet. And many of them basically saying that this isn't hype. I believe that to be true. We've seen some very, I think the combination of the power of the tool and the return you can get and the increased accessibility. We've had a very established AI, traditional AI data science capability here at New York Life for years. We've been developing our own statistical and predictive models, things like underwriting, etcetera, for years.

But the difference with this is the simple nature of programmatic interfacing with it, these large language models. You can be a general technologist and build something pretty remarkable. You don't need to be a PhD in data science. So I think the combination of that general ease of accessibility and the investment that the big hyperscalers are making, this stuff is moving so quickly. I agree with you this. It's it's going to be interesting to see where this goes. So we're we're going to be very thoughtful to try and remain on the bleeding edge.

Rob GalbraithSo Bill, to wrap up on a personal note, what's been the most rewarding aspect of your role and what excites you the most about the future of technology in the insurance industry? Yeah. Mean, Rob, for me,

Bill Cassidylife's all about timing, and you have to find the right fit. So personally, New York Life is an unbelievable institution to work for. I mean, here you have the benefit of 178 year old institution with a culture as steep and stable as the bedrock in New York City. And at the same time, within the walls, we're attempting to redefine ourselves as a bit of a startup and move very nimbly and drive innovation. So the combination of those two things are wonderful. What also gives me great satisfaction every day is knowing that the business that we're in, I mean, New York Life provides a societal good effectively to our customers, especially focusing on the middle market who historically have not have been underserved by traditional financial services institutions.

So the ability to bring new capabilities that helps our agents reach more households to help them and to help them more effectively has been very rewarding. And the commitment from the top, the necessary funding to move the needle. And I've inherited a really amazing leadership team. And we've come together in a really fantastic way. And when you have all that converge, and you actually just like the people you're working with, and you're making a lot of progress, and the work you're doing is satisfied, and the roadmap is really exciting.

Like, it doesn't feel like work. It's it's frankly fun. And this is where we are. And and then the last thing I'll say, what's interesting about New York Life being a mutual that we make long term investments, we make long term bets. So this is not a scenario where all of these initiatives may get unplugged because of next quarterly earnings. If we're a public company, we were sticking with the strategy, we have the long term commitment, we have the capital in order to do that. So that combination of innovation plus stability, plus doing a societal good for me, it's just been it's been unbelievable, unbelievably

Rob Galbraithrewarding. And I'm humbled to have the position that I'm in to be a small part of it. Oh, that's fantastic, Bill. It's, we could go on for a lot longer, but, we'll have to end it there. But it's been fantastic to talk to you. So great to get your perspective, to learn a little bit about you, your background and how you've come to this role and the great work that you're doing at New York Life and as well as a kind of appreciation, right, of the challenge in your day to day job.

And, yeah, I think it's an amazing time, right, To be alive with so many emerging technologies. I mean, we've seen a lot in our lifetimes, but every day, every year, it just feels like, you know, there's new possibilities out there. So it's a really exciting time. Well, great. Well, listen, thanks very much for having me. I enjoyed the conversation and happy to come back another time if there's interest. That would be great. We'd love to have you come back maybe when you get a little bit more experience with GenAI and some other technologies and kind of catch up and see what your progress has been to date on Helping to to to, you know, keep a venerable, I mean, just what a great name.

Right? New York Life is one that everybody knows. It's got a fantastic history and keep you guys, you know, kind of relevant and

Bill Cassidyand, providing your customers with outstanding experiences you've always done. So thank you for that. Well, thanks. Happy holidays to you and your family, and we'll I'll I'll figure out a way to send you a New York next Jersey down there to Texas. Oh, that would be fantastic. Yeah. We, San

Rob GalbraithAntonio, somehow the Spurs started three and two and we ended three and twenty, even though we've got Victor So it's a tough sliding down here, but, you know, hopefully we're also making investments that will pay off in the long term.

Bill CassidyYes.

Rob GalbraithAlright, sir. All the best. Alright. Well, thanks, Bill, and thanks to you for the audience, for, geeking out, with our interview with Bill Cassidy from New York Life. See you next time. This has been the InsurTech Geek podcast powered by JBKnowledge, jbknowledge.com.