2021 Women to Watch Awards Americas EMEA
Janet Lindstrom Executive vice president, chief transformation officer
Arch Insurance Group Inc.
Jersey City, New Jersey
Janet Lindstrom is helping to rebuild and improve activities and operations at Arch Insurance in North America.
She describes her overall role as “optimizing existing paths and designing new paths to make business flow more smoothly,” including digital, process and people transformation.
As a math major at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she graduated in 1990, Ms. Lindstrom said she came very close to going into operations research, the side of her brain she is now feeding with her transformational roles.
“That’s what I love about this. It’s kind of the other route I almost went.”
After serving as an actuary at other insurers, she joined Arch’s actuarial department in 2002, shortly after Bermuda-based parent company Arch Capital Group Ltd. was founded.
“I was interested in being part of a startup, starting from scratch,” she said. She added that she “really learned the business there as an actuary.”
She rose to deputy chief actuary and, in 2018, started a group focusing on improving workflows and processes. In 2019, she also joined the company’s information technology group to help transform operations there, putting “one foot in IT and one foot in the other areas as well.”
This year, Arch brought together the business process management, digital transformation and Arch Management System groups to form the transformation office under Ms. Lindstrom.
“Insurance does not have an operations research discipline, but that’s essentially what these groups are doing,” she said.
Mentoring others, Ms. Lindstrom said, is “of huge importance to me” and she is proud of her role as an executive sponsor of Arch’s mentoring program.
“Janet is a great teacher. She shares her knowledge to help those around her develop their careers,” said Mark Lange, executive vice president, strategy and distribution, at Arch Insurance, who also praised her “ability to understand all aspects of the product development value chain and apply a process orientation to it.”
