Women to Watch: Leslie Nylund

Leslie Nylund

Executive Vp, North American Retail National Partner

Willis Group Holdings Ltd.

New York

Age: 44

Leslie Nylund's career spans the insurance and brokerage sides of the industry. She worked for American International Group Inc. in the large lines casualty/captive group and has been a senior production underwriter at Continental Insurance Co. She then moved on to Marsh Inc., where she was a managing director in charge of the global broking multilines and global broking environmental national practices at Marsh Global Broking. She then became managing director at Guy Carpenter & Co. Inc., where her responsibilities included overseeing several specialty practices. Ms. Nylund joined Willis in 2004 and now is responsible for Willis' sales performance, client service, administration, acquisition and recruiting in New York. She is a senior executive member on Willis' Employer of Choice committee, and she created the Willis Associate Client Advocate program and currently is mentoring two women associates.

What would you change: "I want the industry to finally have the courage to make the information technology investments needed to become efficient and effective so we can deliver quality service to our clients. We need a collaborative effort between insurers and brokers to focus on the back-office administration and service side of the business, so we can deliver to the clients what they demand and require from the post-binding process. We need sets of uniform policy standards so we can more efficiently deliver policies that are accurate the first time, and we need systems to expedite claims payments. If we are more efficient with the paperwork, we can be more proactively consultative and creative."