Team

Jamie Yoder is the Managing Partner of Diamond’s Insurance Industry practice.  He has twenty years of consulting experience advising senior executives of U.S. and International companies in the Insurance and Financial Services sectors on a range of Competitive, Operational and IT strategy and management issues. He has led multiple engagements in linking business and IT strategy, from strategy definition and planning through execution and successful realization of the projected benefits.

Recently Jamie led multidisciplinary teams that collaborated with one of the nation’s largest multi-line insurers to make strategic use of information and technology. His leadership included defining operational and IT strategies, conceiving an information and analytics strategy to transform business operations, transforming the service center and sales organization and operating model, increasing IT efficiency and effectiveness, and managing the execution of large-scale business and IT transformation initiatives.

More broadly, his experience includes helping clients define growth strategies, enhance the customer experience, improve distribution management, create value through information and analytics, improve product agility, and increase operations and IT efficiency and effectiveness.

Jamie holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science with minors in mathematics and business from Indiana University.

Anand S. Rao is a Partner at Diamond with over 21 years of industry and consulting experience, helping senior executives structure, solve and manage critical issues facing their organizations. He has worked extensively on both business and technology issues across a wide range of industry sectors.

His experience spans financial services (capital markets, asset management, retail and corporate banking, payments), insurance (life and retirement income, property & casualty, alternative risk transfer), and telecommunications. He has advised senior executives on creating and extracting value across marketing (i.e., customer experience, customer value management, distribution and sales analysis, segmentation, value proposition, marketing campaigns), operations (i.e., online channels, contact centers, business process redesign, defining and planning large-scale operational and technology transformations), and technology (i.e., conceptual business architecture, information architecture, and Web2.0/Web 3.0 technologies).

Prior to his strategic consulting career he has led and managed innovative artificial-intelligence based approaches for air-combat modeling, air-traffic management, customer service decision support, and telecommunications network management.

Anand has co-edited four books on Intelligent Agents, published over fifty peer-reviewed papers in conferences and journals. He recently received the Most Influential Paper Award for the Decade in 2007 from the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems organization for his contribution on the Belief-Desire-Intention Architecture.

Anand is a frequent speaker at technology and business forums in analytics, behavioral economics, and insurance. He has served on the Organizing Committee and Program Committee of a number of International Conferences and Workshops related to Intelligent Agents. He chairs the Social Networking Committee of the Retirement Income Industry Association (RIIA). Anand has a PhD in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) from University of Sydney and an MBA from Melbourne Business School in Australia.

Marie Carr

Marie Carr is a Partner in Diamond’s Insurance practice. While her client experience spans between financial services, healthcare and public sector, her emphasis is in insurance, including disability, health, life and property and casualty insurance. Her expertise is in developing and operationalizing strategies which impact market growth, customer experience and distribution value. She also specializes in strategic business alignment and executive workshop facilitation.Recently, Marie led the development of several strategies for the CMO and the marketing leadership team of a $20 billion property and casualty insurer. For a $5 billion group insurer, Marie led the strategy articulation, market validation and implementation planning for its five year growth strategy. In addition, Marie led the creation of a new operations strategy which served as the platform for decision making about business capabilities, customer loyalty/retention, product development, distribution management and technology infrastructure, for a large group insurer.

Prior to Diamond, Marie worked in institutional money management, mergers & acquisitions, and started and managed her own business and benefit planning firm. Marie is a member of Executive Club of Chicago. She also leads a faith-based financial educational program called “Finance: According to Your Faith” which has been seen throughout the US and in over a 100 countries throughout the world.

Marie has a Ph.D in church administration and finance from Hope Bible School and Seminary, a Master of Business Administration degree in finance and marketing from the University Of Chicago Booth School Of Business, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Northwestern University. She also continues her education via the Executive Education Program at the London School of Economics.

Punita Gandhi

Punita Gandhi is a Principal in Diamond’s Insurance practice. Her emphasis is on developing business strategies that identify and leverage core competencies to build non-replicable competitive advantage for clients in the property and casualty insurance space. Punita has more than 10 years of experience in business, information, long-term change strategy, new product opportunities, growth as well as cost-management strategies in insurance and other industries.

Recently, Punita has been advising the CEO of a leading P&C company to define their overall internal and outward facing business strategies, and identify unique opportunities to leverage their scale as a key competitive lever.

Prior to Diamond, Punita worked in marketing research in India and Singapore where she introduced social science methods (ethnography, etc.) to the study of end-user technology usage trends, which helped telecom and ISP companies develop new applications and strategies for Internet and mobile networks, and 3G. She published work on adapting global communication to Asian markets at the ESOMAR.

Punita has a Bachelor of arts in Psychology, English and Journalism from Bangalore University, a graduate diploma in communications from the Mudra Institute of Communications, India and an MBA in Strategy and Public Policy from The Wharton School. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Mansoor Bajowala

Mansoor Bajowala is a Principal in Diamond’s Global  Insurance Practice.  He has ten years of experience in strategic  planning , program management and execution roles.  Mansoor has successfully helped Fortune 500 companies develop strategies and execute full life cycle implementations.  He has acquired technical and functional skills in a number of current and emerging technologies and has gained exposure to business processes within the insurance, public sector and banking industries.

Recently, Mansoor has been helping a $26B national P&C insurance carrier to develop and execute strategic roadmaps in their commercial small and middle market segments of business.   This included,  roadmap development based on strategic priorities, business case development and maintenance, program mobilization including the establishment of a PMO, management of resource ramp up and Stakeholder communication, program management and mentoring/coaching of PMO staff, 3rd party data assessments, project management & content lead for several projects.

For a large $15B P&C carrier, Mansoor assisted with the organizational assessment of  the group responsible for financial reporting.  The scope of work included a current state assessment, future-state recommendations to address the increased demand from external business areas and a roadmap to bridge the gap. Mansoor helped create a high-level implementation plan, business case, and future-state architecture for the migration of agent productivity and compensation data into a data warehouse and a Quality Assurance methodology for a new QA organization.

Mansoor holds a BA from Northwestern University where he graduated with a double major in Economics and Biochemistry.  Prior to joining Diamond, Mansoor spent three years at Accenture.