A few years into its acquisition of financial planning company LearnVest Inc., The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co. is seeing positive results from the merger of its financial services products with the startup’s streamlined digital experience. Emilia Sherifova (pictured), vice president of architecture and engineering at Northwestern Mutual, works to integrate both the technological and human aspects of product and culture at the company.

“Often it’s a human-driven problem. And often humans do not want to deal with their finances,” Sherifova said.

Sherifova spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed Northwestern Mutual’s approach to innovating products for clients, as well as the workplace experience for its employees.

Northwestern Mutual’s strategy for engaging clients is building tools that delight them, giving them a more holistic understanding of their finances to make planning feel more accessible. “There is a way to do that in an easy, digestible and kind of delightful way, where we’re able to leverage technology and predictive capabilities to really push for financial security for our clients,” Sherifova said.

One way in which the company stays connected is through a comprehensive financial wellness score that gives clients a 360-degree view of their life and encourages them to take measures to maintain financial health. “After we’ve gotten a couple data points about you and gathered some of the predictive data points that we know are probably true about you, [we] give you a score that gives you an idea what the probability is of you reaching your financial goal, or you retiring, or you going broke,” Sherifova said.

Improving experience for customers and employees

So far the partnership has proven advantageous for Northwestern Mutual and its clients. “Now that we’ve rolled out a lot of these customer experiences … our traffic has gone up dramatically. … It’s a much-needed thing, and we’re here to help them,” Sherifova said.

With her team’s guidance, customers are beginning to engage with their financial planning and see the positive results it can have on their futures.

Sherifova hopes to have a similarly positive impact on the diversity issue that plagues her industry. Though she has experienced supportive cultures throughout her career, with both finance and tech being historically male-dominated, Sherifova has seen the ill effects of exclusion in the workplace.

“The majority of many teams I’ve been part of have been majority male. Whether my teammates want to be inclusive and engaging, when the majority is someone else that doesn’t look like you, act like you, lean on similar defaults as you, it does not make for a very welcome environment,” she said.

Sherifova’s solution to this issue is improvements to the onboarding process. “If you don’t have a formal onboarding practice, onboarding can happen in informal ways. And when it happens in informal ways, you tend to be attracted to the people who are like you,” Sherifova said.

After attending her first Grace Hopper Conference, she’s even more encouraged to continue her efforts. “I am inspired to keep pushing,” she concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

Photo: SiliconANGLE