By: Hannah Scott

Innovators have the ability to drive evolution. Catalyzing potential and inventing next-generation applications, they impact society, reshape narratives, improvise living, and remodel businesses. They are masters of reimagining and building the future from scratch.

Dr. Henna Karna is one such innovator who dreamt of a future where global economies are resilient enough to withstand emerging crises. She aims to safeguard the financial livelihood of the masses. Turning this dream into her passion, Dr. Karna uses her mindset, problem-solving approach, organizational skills, and technological expertise to recast the risk management, financial services, and insurance industry and orient it towards building global risk resilience.

Risk resilience is an entity’s ability to withstand a stressful event. Unfortunately, the resiliency score is down-trending globally. The livelihood of a large part of the worldwide population is under threat. Risk factors like disasters or pandemics can materialize and negatively affect economic survival.

To solve this problem, Dr. Karna has been working across several organizations to build business models that increase risk resilience as part of their strategy going forward. 

Dr. Karna’s approach lies in changing the way organizations utilize artificial intelligence, data, and analytics. She believes that top managements need to reimagine data analytics and leverage artificial and augmented Intelligence, including Generative AI, in key areas in the workflow. They must infuse it with a holistic perspective, transforming how data is gathered, harnessed, and leveraged for business decisions.

Dr. Karna’s approach suggests balancing short-term and long-term gains and she often highlights that continuous improvement efforts sometimes take away from truly innovative outcomes. To that end, she designed a methodology to build an innovative premium in the product management process. She modernized real-time data acquisition techniques by implementing behavioral analytics. She has also designed special algorithms for drawing out vital information from vast datasets, creating a data-driven approach to risk management.

However, that’s not all to her approach. She emphasizes developing digital ecosystems that transform customer engagement from a transactional nature to more of a trusted partner one. “Digital ecosystems must integrate a myriad of data sources and develop client-focused digital solutions with quantifiable growth targets. Thus grounding a data-driven approach to risk management,” Dr. Karna asserts.

That said, developing these digital ecosystems, she noticed a need for a client-focused risk management business model. Dr. Karna restructured the traditional business templates to align them with customer-centric engagement models. This new system complemented digital ecosystems by better addressing customers’ needs and preferences, giving them a clear view of the risk landscape.

“The holy grail is letting the customer see what we can see (well, what they need to see) – giving them access to relevant factors based on what we gathered and helping them mitigate their own risk,” is how Dr. Karna describes the approach of customer-centricity. Her most repeated quote is, “Originator owns the data.”

Amalgamating data-driven and customer-centric approaches, Dr. Karna developed a business strategy that enables insurance firms to understand risks, customer challenges, workflow efficiencies, and underwriting faults at a deeper level. It facilitates organizations to move from loss financing to risk prevention, enhancing cross-selling and upselling potential, and updating risk portfolios. Ultimately building stronger economies by incrementing risk resiliency scores. 

Dr. Karna’s innovation spans every sector within the risk management industry, from strategic and tactical aspects to human and technological imperatives. Her approach has already proven its impact through her successful tenures at Google and AXA XL, two big names in the insurance business.

In conclusion Dr. Karna believes that when a purpose drives passion, success becomes the backdrop of accomplishments. “My passion for building industry solutions to create risk resiliency is driven by the purpose to accelerate human advancement and create a better world for future generations,” she says.

Visit Dr. Henna Karna at www.hennakarna.com to learn more about her innovative ideas to build risk resiliency.

Published By: Aize Perez