Carlo Nebuloni, chief data officer, AXA UK&I

Describe your career to date

After my degree in industrial engineering, I started my career in consulting, working for the major Italian insurance clients. This is where I learnt the fundamentals of the insurance business and developed a passion for it. In these 12 years as a consultant, I learnt skills such as process design and re-engineering, strategy and technical skills, such as data modelling. These would be fundamental for my future developments.

My last project as a consultant was the design of a new direct business for AXA Italy and I got so passionate about it that I ended up being the first employee in that business, named Quixa. I joined as CIO, with a mission to build from scratch all the direct platform for digital processes.

That was a fantastic experience where I developed – a first in Italy - a fast quotation process for motor insurance, quoting with just number plate. There were a lot of data connections involved in the background. I then joined the UK direct business of AXA in 2013 as COO, shaping the operations with data-driven insights, and introducing cross-selling which was a massive success.

Finally, I moved to the AXA UK and Ireland in charge of cross-selling and developed our first single customer view, which led me to the CDO job. As CDO, I am supporting four business units, developing the data strategy and increasing the maturity of the data teams sitting with the business units, which are now delivering tens of millions in value through data use cases.