Chubb's Ana Robic on 2024: I want to educate customers about the insurance they don't realize they need

• Ana Robic has been at the insurance company Chubb for 25 years.
• She's working on wealth transfer, embedded insurance, and flood insurance.
• Robic's insights are part of Business Insider's year-end leadership series, "Looking Ahead 2024."

Ana Robic got her start at Chubb 25 years ago, as an intern in Canada. Now she's the division president of the insurance company's personal risk services in North America.

What was supposed to be a way to get through the summer doing "the lame insurance thing" turned into a career, she said.

Chubb is a commercial and personal property- and casualty-insurance company that focuses on insuring the homes, cars, toys, jewelry, and wine of high-net-worth individuals.

"People's expectations of this industry are generally quite wrong," Robic told Business Insider. She's worked on the commercial and personal sides of the business, including in underwriting. "It's not deemed as sexy, but that was by far one of the most rewarding jobs I had," she added.

While she acknowledged that luck had been a factor in her career, she said that "self-advocacy is nothing to be ashamed of."

A growing focus for Chubb is wealth transfer, or helping wealthy people pass on things like collector cars, a second home, a watch collection, or a wine collection.

What makes insurance unique, Robic said, is that "the thing you're promising people doesn't change." She described insurance as a promise. "We're saying trust me — should something go wrong, you've given me all this money for that promise," she said. "If a bad day comes when our clients are at their worst, we should be at our best."

Robic's insights are part of Business Insider's year-end leadership package, "Looking Ahead 2024," which digs into vision, strategy, and challenges across corporate America.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What's one thing you're excited about for 2024?

I'm super excited that my almost-17-year-old daughter will get her driver's license in January, going on to drive all over New Jersey for volleyball tournaments. But I'm also most concerned about that, because it's scary when your kid starts driving — especially if you're a mother in the insurance industry.

On the business side, we're looking forward to continuing many of our employee engagement efforts, including getting some stronger outcomes from our DEI initiatives. It's an area we know we can be better in, and we've launched a bunch of internal efforts around improving diversity in all parts of our business.

I firmly believe that greater diversity can better business outcomes. I'm looking forward to next year actually seeing some of the fruits of a lot of those efforts.

I'm looking forward to attracting and retaining the best talent and having the composition of our employee teams continue to change so that they reflect the markets in which we operate.

What's one thing you're concerned about for 2024?

There's a risk when you've got the lead in a race of getting complacent. And our clients have put us in the lead. We're very grateful for that, that they have that trust in us. We can afford to sit back.

I think the risk for us is continuing to build that culture and making sure that the team maintains that high bar — keeps up the energy and drive to achieve more.

What is one thing you got right in 2023?

It's treating your clients like they're the center of all your success. Building a culture centered around creating the best client experience is something we spend a ton of time on. And it sounds silly, because it's insurance, and I think you're inundated with images on TV as to what insurance is. But it's really hard to get that right.

When clients choose Chubb, they expect that when something goes wrong, we're going to exceed their expectations, not just meet them. So figuring out how we do that day in and day out when it comes to your claim is something we work very hard at. I think we really got that right this year.

One of the things we measure is how often after a claim our clients tell us they're highly satisfied. And our score this year was 94% — 94% of the time our clients are highly satisfied.

We also have anecdotal evidence, which is not super scientific. Like, last week I was flying back from Dallas, and the guy beside me saw the job name on my laptop when I opened it. And he launched into this story about a tree getting hit by lightning six years ago at his house and how amazing we were. He will be a customer for life.

You look at large catastrophes, like the Hawaiian wildfires. We were one of the first insurance companies on-site starting to rebuild people's lives. There's a point of pride in that knowing you're right there.

What's one thing you got wrong in 2023?

One thing that we maybe got wrong was we weren't moving fast enough in some areas that are still full of opportunity for our business.

We're really growing this digital embedded insurance internationally, but in North America it's still sort of in its infancy.

So if you go and buy a luxury good online — think a watch or jewelry, even potentially wine — I want to be able to sell you an insurance product that you might need right at that point of sale.

We've started doing that with some partners. I just think there's a lot more opportunity. So we're ramping up our sales and technology teams to do that better and do more of that next year. It's just not moving fast enough is probably the regret.

Similarly, flood insurance — most people don't realize that's a separate purchase from your homeowners insurance. And less than 5% of our customers buy flood insurance. We have a product, and we need to do a better job of explaining to others that for a very nominal cost you can protect yourself from something that is far more pervasive than you realize.

I just want to go faster in some of these places to deliver these products to our clients.