JOE TOCCO is a veteran not only of insurance, but of the US Navy. Before joining the industry, he spent nine years as a nuclear field service engineer, the majority of that time on nuclear submarines. “I think it really did form a lot of my early thinking,” he says of his time in the Navy.
Tocco undertook several leadership roles during those years, but his Navy tenure also provided a valuable opportunity for him toobserve and learn from other leaders.
“You quickly identify with some of the good leadership – there was a lot of that,” he says. “You also quickly learn from people in these positions who were horrible leaders. It really helped form the way I thought about leading people, working with people [and] building teams. Being on a nuclear submarine, your life at any minute is dependent on having the right people around you and being able to trust the people that you’re with. So, as you built your teams, you had to make sure that if you didn’t have people you could trust, you had to help train them and bring them along.”
Tocco has also faced many challenges as an insurance leader, including being on the ground in New York City during 9/11. “I was working at a different firm at the time … my office was downtown next to the World Trade Center,” he says.
Tocco lost four colleagues in the attacks, including his best friend.
“What ended up happening was I was promoted into my best friend’s role, which was, in my own mind, an incredible challenge to deal with and overcome,” he says. “And then [I had] to be strong enough to provide the leadership that the team really needed back then, because everybody was at a loss. Nobody knew what we were going to do and if we were even going to be able to continue to work, if we could ever come back into Manhattan … [that] would probably be the biggest challenge that I think I’ve had to deal with throughout my career.”
Ensuring excellence
Today, Tocco is chief executive of insurance in North America for the recently merged
XL Catlin. For a massive carrier like XL Catlinto to stand out in today’s fiercely competitive climate, Tocco says, “I really think it comes down to being absolutely excellent at everything we do. We need to … deliver on our promises and deliver excellent service from start to finish, including claims handling, payments, issuing policies and a lot of the basic blocking and tackling, but do it better than anybody.”
He also acknowledges that staying on top in today’s insurance industry means investing in new technology such as artificial intelligence.
“If we’re able to improve our operations and leverage real-time data [and] drive underwriting decisions better with the use of artificial intelligence, I think that would be a real benefit for us,” Tocco says. “How we can maybe use that artificial intelligence to make us better as an organization as well is certainly an opportunity for us.”
He points to XL Catlin’s internal innovation team, Accelerate, which works with each business unit to generate new opportunities through the use of new technologies, including AI. “That’s a fairly small team, but they’re moving very quickly and looking at all sorts of opportunities.”
According to Tocco, XL Catlin has been engaging in efforts to protect itself from disruptors for some time now – particularly through XL Innovate, its venture capital play.
“We make investments in a lot of different startup operations,” Tocco says. “We ultimately might buy those outright, bring them in house, sell them off or maintain our investment and let things play out. But it gives us a seat at the table for all of this emerging technology and emerging trends. It’s been quite exciting to see that play itself out, and there are a number of examples where we’ve been very successful.”
Specifically, Tocco mentions XL Group’s 2015 acquisition of New Energy Risk, an insurance solutions provider for the renewable energy sector, which he says “has really been a great win for us.”
He also points to the insurer’s landmark agreement with Oxbotica, a spin-off from Oxford University’s Mobile Robotics Group, which focuses on the development of autonomous vehicles.
“They reached out and asked us to partner with them to start learning what they were doing with autonomous vehicles – and for us, in turn, to share with them insights on how we are going to work together to enable this technology to actually advance, because they’re going to need insurable solutions in order for this to really get mass appeal and for people to buy into this,” Tocco says. “For us, the advantage is really being on the cutting edge of the new trends associated with autonomous vehicles and how we can use that and apply that not only with Oxbotica, but obviously for all the other industries and manufacturers that will be using this technology.”
Thinking ahead
Tocco is excited to be part of a firm that’s embracing new ideas in order to maintain its relevance well into the future.
“One of our new values that we’ve added recently is to be future-focused,” he says, “and it’s really about preparing us for the next few decades and to make sure that we are incredibly relevant throughout that time.”
Tocco is confident that XL Catlin has the talent and the culture to make that happen.
“Our culture is one that’s very inclusive – people work to help each other and for us to be successful,” he says. “As we start to really leverage that going forward, bringing the talent across both XL and Catlin … to the forefront as one XL Catlin team in this market, I think we can’t be beat.”
