TOM CLARK embarked on his insurance career more than three decades ago, securing a place in Cigna Property and Casualty Insurance’s management training program. To say he’s amassed impressive experience since that time is certainly an understatement.
“I think I’ve been very fortunate to have the opportunity to work for several different insurance carriers in many different geographies,” he says. “I’ve learned a tremendous amount in terms of leadership and the business.”
Clark recalls one especially challenging episode in his career. “I was working for a mid-sized, publicly traded regional carrier,” he says. “Within a 24-month period, we went from the best year the company ever had to a rating downgrade.
Through this process, you experience it all in terms of managing perceptions [and] the need for constant communication. It really gives you some insight as to the best and worst of leadership and the value of relationships with your colleagues and agency partners.”
Clark took on his current role as president of
Nationwide E&S/Specialty in December 2015. “We have been extremely stable and a relied-upon E&S carrier in this space for more than 30 years, [which] gives us great brand and reputational recognition,” he says. “While you’ve seen others over the years that have come and gone, we have built tremendous franchise value with trusted, long-term, committed agency partners.”
Traits specific to Nationwide that have been key differentiators, Clark says, are the expertise of its people and the depth of the relationships between those employees and their customers. “Those relationships have created a working environment of trust that I think is invaluable in this business,” he says. “It’s those relationships and the years of experience that our folks have in working with those customers that have set us apart from most of the industry.”
Surplus opportunities
In terms of the E&S sector as a whole, Clark believes it’s a “very exciting time” right now. “Everything around us is moving at an exponential
pace – the ongoing impact of technology and automation continues to challenge us to think differently about exposures [and] how we build products for the future,” he explains. “What we do as a leadership team here is meet on a regular basis to discuss and vet out what we feel are the emerging trends and what we call our ‘next best investments.’
These areas of opportunity are then discussed and prioritized, with feedback from our agents. “We place a tremendous amount of importance – I can’t stress this enough – on getting the voice of the customer in everything we do,” he continues. “We do not want to be the company that sits here and second-guesses what we think our customer, or ultimately the consumer, wants. We want to hear it from our agency partners because they’re the ones with [an] ear to the ground, and they will identify these issues long before we ever will.”
In that regard, Clark says agency partnerships are critical to Nationwide’s success – and the company is taking steps to strengthen
those relationships.
“What we’re trying to do is to help drive greater connectivity between the Nationwide retail agents and the Nationwide wholesale agency partners,” he says. “We have about 10,000 Nationwide retail agents. Those agents write about $15 billion of premium with Nationwide. What we’re trying to do is [determine] how we can get those retail agents to funnel more of their business to our wholesale agents.
“We’re strengthening the value chain from consumer to retailer to wholesaler to carrier,” he continues. “I recognize that others have tried this; however, we feel that based on our breadth of product, our national footprint and just the critical mass that we have in both the retail and wholesale space, we’re uniquely qualified to make this work. Making this work, I think, only strengthens our commitment to our distribution chain, driving greater efficiencies and revenue to our agency partners.”
Building blocks
Clark is also pursuing ways to optimize new and existing talent. He mentions a focus on transferring knowledge from employees moving toward the end of their careers to younger employees, which he describes as “creating stepping stones into retirement.”
“I don’t know how many people are ready to go from a full sprint of day-to-day work … to a full-blown retirement,” he says. “I think there’s a real opportunity to leverage the talent we have and create this information transfer that allows us to maintain the strength of the industry through knowledge transfer.”
His team is also considering how to engage the interest of potential recruits during their high-school years.
“Can we reach into some of the high schools [and] provide a student the opportunity to work for our organization as an intern this summer – and if they hit three years of successful internship with us, could we provide them some kind of financial reimbursement toward a college education?” he says. “Can we provide [high-school students] a career track and an educational track that creates a loyalty to this company as they move forward? That’s what we’re working on.”
In the short-term, however, Clark is focused on a few key goals over the next 12 months. “We will continue to manage the market to optimize profitable growth with our agency partners,” he says. “Profitable growth creates the needed capital for us to continue to invest and diversify our portfolio, which has really been the foundation of success for Nationwide E&S for the past 30 years. We are constantly looking for new products and services that we can provide our wholesale partners to allow them to grow with us, and I think that will continue to be the principal lever of differentiation in the market.”
