When Andreas Kleiner was appointed chief executive and president of American Modern Insurance Group in 2016, he had his work cut out for him. He is responsible for the company’s strategic leadership, but thanks to decades of industry experience – including 14 years with American Modern’s parent company, Munich Re – Kleiner has been successful in his role.
Today, he is overseeing the completion of an eight-year transformation program to upgrade American Modern’s technological infrastructure, which was previously dependent on a legacy system.
Kleiner’s impact, both within and outside his company, has made him one of Insurance Business America’s Hot 100 for 2023, a list of the industry’s most innovative and ambitious leaders.
American Modern’s transformation was inspired by the need to change its “very disjointed IT landscape” similar to that of many US-based insurers, Kleiner told Insurance Business. “The idea was to get rid of seven legacy IT systems and put everything into one fully integrated, state-of-the-art IT platform.”
American Modern also had numerous products and product generations that needed an update. Kleiner and his team solved this problem by revamping the product landscape from a fragmented one to a “cafeteria” model, which would enable customers to choose certain products and add anything else they wanted, as if selecting dishes from a menu.
Kleiner describes the company’s new program as “an umbrella across all kinds of digital initiatives and all parts of the organization so that they’re all getting connected and not done in isolation.”
American Modern’s goal is to become “a digital leader in our market segment by 2025,” he said. “We have the vision of having all the interfaces between us and our customers, which is both the policyholders as well as our sales partners, [become] fully digitally enabled.”
His plan for the company is centered on making policyholder self-servicing easier through data pre-population, digital claims, digital underwriting, and APIs. In 2023, American Modern will continue to operate with a customer-centric approach and ensure a better agent experience.
“It’s very much a cultural thing, and we’re trying to drive our corporate culture that becomes part of our DNA, that we say customer centricity needs to be left, right, center for us,” he explained. “[We] are trying to supplement it also with some very structured processes, so we have customer journey mapping, so whenever we design a new process which is customer facing, there is user experience design at the front of it.”
Despite ongoing challenges in the market this year, Kleiner has encouraged brokers and agents, saying they can benefit from opportunities while adopting tech advances to strengthen their business.
