Pets Best's Melissa Gutierrez: Women in Insurance Leadership 2023

Melissa Gutierrez

Melissa Gutierrez, senior vice president and general manager for Pets Best, sees a lot of opportunity for “rapid growth” in the pet insurance industry, especially in a digital space.

“We have just begun to scratch the surface of finding ways to come up with competitively-priced pet health insurance products,” Gutierrez said.

Gutierrez joined Pets Best as senior vice president and general manager in late 2020.

She started her career in the insurance industry when she was still a college student studying “one of my many majors in college.”

“Insurance is kind of a family thing,” Gutierrez said. “My father was an insurance agent for many years, and when I was in college it came time for me to have to work to pay my way through. Since my dad was an insurance agent and we had a very large insurance company, Nationwide, right in town, he said, ‘Why don’t you apply there?’ So I did. I thought it would be a temporary thing, but I really fell in love with the idea of protecting people, protecting their financial well-being, and I had many opportunities to do a lot of different roles. So I ended up staying.”

After graduating with an MBA in business, Gutierrez continued working for Nationwide Insurance in various capacities for 20+ years until Pets Best (a managing general agency purchased by Synchrony in 2019) offered her a management position. 

“When I was approached by the folks from Pets Best, what occurred to me was the very dramatic rapid growth in the industry,” Gutierrez said. “The industry growth was 20 to 25% a year… I was really drawn to the idea of solving problems tied to growth, as opposed to maybe focusing more on expense management. This was more about how can I keep up with really rapid growth in an industry and how can I bring a team together to stay engaged and resilient when we’re pushing 30 to 40% growth a year.”

“We have a lot of energy at Pets Best and Synchrony around total financial solutions for a pet parent,” Gutierrez said. “We’re really working to innovate across total financial well-being for the pet parent across credit and insurance. At the same time, I think there are tons of opportunities to come up with lower-cost insurance products so more people can get coverage for their pets.”

However, many pet owners are not aware that pet health insurance even exists since it is a relatively new product in the insurance sector. “Lack of awareness… is a challenge,” Gutierrez said.

“The other area that I think is a challenge, and also an opportunity, is that we price pet insurance today the same way using the same variables that we used 15 years ago,” Gutierrez went on. “I think there is a great deal of opportunity for innovation to make the product more affordable for many people. With a pet health insurance product, as the pet ages, the need for care is greater and greater. We want to make sure that we can offer affordable coverage at every stage of that pet’s life.”