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Chetan Kandhari is the leader of Nationwide’s Enterprise Innovation and Digital organization. As the Chief Innovation and Digital Officer, Chetan is accountable for leading the company’s digital vision and maturing our enterprise digital capabilities and expertise while creating new customer-centric digital products and services for members and partners. He leads with a strong passion for customer and technology – centered innovation.

Chetan has a think big, start small, learn fast and scale quickly mentality. As a seasoned organizational and people leader, he has repeatedly developed high performing teams to work towards a common vision and purpose. A highly effective agile leader, Chetan is driven to ensure long term relevance for a company’s mission.

During his 15-year tenure at Nationwide, Chetan has progressively held roles of increasing responsibility. He successfully delivered on several of the industry’s largest transformations with more than $1B in investment towards creating single core platforms for Policy, Claims, Customer and Data. Still early in his tenure as the leader of innovation, his teams have launched and piloted several initiatives while adopting an experimentation and learning mindset.

In his prior role as Chief Technology Officer for P&C operations, Chetan oversaw the development and deployment of Nationwide’s Express platform and SmartMiles, as well as integrations with strategic partners such as Amazon, Toyota, and Ford. He was also responsible for Personal Lines Transformation, a 7-year, $600M effort to upgrade legacy systems to a more current platform. Prior to this, he was the Enterprise Application CIO where he oversaw all the corporate, marketing, finance, HR and investment applications. Earlier in his career, Chetan was a consultant with Diamond Technology Partners and Ernst & Young, focused on large scale program delivery and architecture.

Chetan holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from The Ohio State University, a Master of Science in Information Systems from Miami University, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Muskingum University. He is a member of World 50, a private community for CEOs and C-level executives from globally respected organizations. He is also currently serves on the advisory board for Howard University’s school of computer science.

Chetan was born in India, where he frequently returns to visit, and he moved to the United States in 1993. Married, with two children, he spends his free time hiking, reading and vacationing with his family and he encourages his team members to strive for a balance between work and life.