Woodruff Sawyer is one of the largest independent insurance brokerages in the world.
Matt Kulangara is partner, CIO and CISO at the company, where he has worked for five years, building Enterprise IT. Out of college, he started at Chubb, another insurance monolith.
“First, I joined the help desk, then I had 15 years to build a deep skill set in insurance and tech,” he says. “The thing that I didn't have a whole lot of experience with was on the personal side, so they sent me to Harvard to get a Masters degree in Information Systems Management.”
Over the past 25 years, Kulangara has taken on every role in tech, from network engineering to application development and project management, all the way to Vice President of Global IT. This was followed by ACE Insurance, one of the largest carriers in the world.
When the opportunity arose to join Woodruff Sawyer, it was at a pivotal moment where they needed a CIO and where Kulangara could get an equity stake in the company as well.
“Every step at Woodruff Sawyer has been informative and it's been a learning experience,” he says. “I learn something new about insurance and technology everyday - and I’ve been in the sector for years.”
As a risk management firm, Woodruff Sawyer has made itself known for its customer service.
“A lot of the large brokers that big clients work with, they don't provide the type of customer care that we provide,” explains Kulangara. “We're known for being a risk management firm that is also a brokerage which provides exceptional customer service.”
Woodruff Sawyer is specifically known by companies that are going to become IPOs.
“I can't get into specific names, but any name that you would hear about in the Bay Area that's a tech company… there's a good chance we were involved in the IPO for that,” Matt
Kulangara shares: “We have some of the best brokers in the world in that space, we really are the best in the world at Management Liability Insurance.”
Yet the company has largely evolved since Kulangara joined – especially seeing as he arrived right before COVID-19 struck. After getting familiar with the inner-workings of the company, Kulangara had to drop everything and reshape Woodruff Sawyer into a remote working company.
“That was a big challenge in IT and we spent a year doing just that,” he recalls.
At the same time, Kulangara wanted to help the company become more security aware and security focused.
“As one of the leading brokerage firms in the world, we had to put security first in everything, even as we were going remote,” Kulangara says.
Kulangara had strong support from his COO and CEO to be able to do this – they could see their teams spending all of their time hopping around 50 different systems, using most of their time context switching and doing clerical work, not doing what they do best, which is servicing clients. This is where the idea of Connect came from.
“The core idea of Connect is, let's have one place for employees to do their work. A single place, instead of hopping around between emails and going to another platform to do something that's a third party system. This platform allows folk to reduce context switching, but also allows us to standardise workflows.”
In 2020, Woodruff Sawyer found that people were doing things differently, in different parts of the business. Connect became a way to standardise daily processes across the company.
“Since Connect arrived, the company has grown tremendously,” Kulangara adds. “The company has boomed during the period that I have been here. That's not all my doing, but it's been an experience to watch us grow.”
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