Chubb's Camila Serna is writing the future of embedded insurance

Camila Serna

Camila Serna, executive vice president, global head of digital acceleration at Chubb in New York, is responsible for growing new digital business models and sources of premium through business-to-business-to-consumer affinity partnerships. That includes partnerships where Chubb sells insurance products to the customers of digital companies, embedding into the digital companies’ apps through Chubb’s own application programming interfaces (APIs). 

Chubb’s digital business has expanded to nearly 200 digital platforms and financial institutions, with more than 20 million digital policies and access to 375 million customers. In 2022, Chubb’s digital business produced about $500 million in gross premiums through digital platforms with an underwriting profit. Serna sees more room for growth and this is just one of the reasons why she was selected by Digital Insurance as a 2023 Women in Insurance Leadership honoree.

“We believe that there is a great opportunity yet to be tapped in the embedded insurance space across several key verticals, including fintech, e-commerce, mobility and gig platforms,” Serna says. For example, Chubb partnered with a Grab — a ride-hailing, food-delivery and payment app in Southeast Asia — to provide gig-worker and individual consumer insurance. Through a partnership with Nubank in Latin America, Chubb embedded term life insurance in the digital bank’s app. “For every geography, there have been examples of partnerships like that where we’ve done app-based distribution of seamless, contextual, simplified insurance coverage that matches up with whatever transaction a consumer is doing in an app,” she says.

Part of Serna’s work is expanding those successes into new geographic areas. “We have a product suite for consumers in North America that is evolving based on what we have learned from Asia and LatAm,” where the regulatory environment and speed at which the consumer market evolves allows for more experimentation, she says. “We have been able to move faster in Latin America and Asia, but Europe and North America — developed markets — are also in our objectives as far as growing digital businesses and establishing new business models.”

Serna also guides the global manager of Chubb Studio on adding capabilities to the platform, which provides tools for Chubb’s digital company partners to offer insurance through their own apps. It includes middleware — the APIs that simplify Chubb’s policy administration and communicates with the partners’ technology — and software development kits that allow partners to add insurance offerings with minimal software engineering of their own. Since Chubb Studio launched in 2020, Serna has  been working with the platform’s team on adding capabilities based on partner demand and what has been proven to work, she says. More than 150 of Chubb’s digital distribution partners use Chubb Studio APIs.

“We always need to make it as seamless as possible and as contextual as possible with the partner and their branding so that we don’t disrupt the flow, because we have learned that that gives us a much better conversion,” Serna says. “If they want to add insurance as a value-added service to their ecosystem, they don’t want to have too much distraction to stand up the program or too much expense to get it to work.”

To determine what to add to Chubb Studio, Serna says, the company analyzes market research and its own performance data. For example: “Our market research showed that millennials and digitally savvy consumers wanted simpler, seamless insurance with no jargon. So I worked on a business case to create a North America digital consumer division,” she says. That division came up with Blink by Chubb, a brand targeting those consumers with products including paycheck-related insurance for freelancers, and Blink Cyber for insuring the digital life of consumers. 

In another example, Serna worked on Chubb’s sensor program, which later became the business case for Chubb in 2021 to acquire StreamLabs, a business that makes Internet of Things water leak sensors to prevent water damage.

“Things start as a little proof of concept that doesn’t have a home. They come to my team, we figure out how to frame it, we get it going and many times they become business cases to create divisions,” she says. “Our philosophy is to do straightforward insurance policies that are pre-underwritten and can be customizable to the consumer base of a given earner based on their lifestyle and protection needs.”

To invite some outside perspectives on Chubb Studio, Serna organized the Chubb Studio Innovation Challenge in October and November 2022, inviting more than 300 innovators from software development, e-commerce and the insurance industry to work on new ideas for embedding insurance. Besides learning ideas for making Chubb Studio easier to work with, the company also enjoyed some recruiting benefits from the event, generating interest in software developers and other university students in insurance work.

Serna represents Chubb in the socio-economic resilience working group of the Geneva Association, the global insurance think tank, and she has served as co-chair of the Chubb Hispanic Latino Employee Network and co-chair of Mosaic, Chubb’s multicultural business round table. She has also coached for the Chubb Culture Officer’s Talent Champion Program.