A career built on reinvention — and led by curiosity
For centuries, the insurance industry changed by degrees, not leaps. Progress was measured, cautious, and deliberate — a reflection of its promise to safeguard stability. Today, that measured pace has given way to something far more dynamic. Digital platforms, shifting customer expectations, and a surge of AI innovation are reshaping how insurers price, service, and secure their products. The industry now stands at a crossroads, where success depends on leaders who can blend human insight with technical mastery and guide their organizations through complexity into entirely new territory.
As Global Insurance Consult Lead at Kyndryl, one of the world’s largest IT services firms, Ralitsa Nenkova helps some of the most cautious organizations find speed — guiding them from plans on paper to change in practice.
It’s work that comes at a pivotal time for the industry. Cloud, data, and now agentic AI are rewriting how insurance products are priced, serviced, and secured — forcing incumbents to move from incremental change to wholesale redesign. It’s in that environment, Ralitsa’s job isn’t just about technology adoption; it’s about helping insurers become AI-native enterprises, where human and digital teams learn and adapt together.
Her leadership is grounded in a personal journey shaped by risk-taking, reinvention, and ambition. Raised in Bulgaria in the waning years of communism, Ralitsa learned early that opportunity isn’t guaranteed on its own.
“We had very little. But in that environment, I learned the value of hard work, self-reliance, and the necessity of constantly reinventing one’s possibilities,” she recalls.
Her mother, an academic who led the family, modeled decisiveness and resilience — traits that would later inform Ralitsa’s talent for leading through ambiguity.
A scholarship took her to the U.K., where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English and a Master’s degree in drama. The experience of forging success far from home, often as the outsider in a new system, would later shape her deep sensitivity to diversity, adaptability, and cultural nuance — a theme threaded through her career.
The risk taker’s road: A career built on reinvention
That career has never been a linear progression — and that’s precisely what defines it. For nearly a decade, Ralitsa made her mark as a teacher in Britain, shaping minds while quietly defying expectations about where her own life would lead. In her classroom, she cultivated resilience, empathy, and a love of learning — qualities that would later prove as essential in business as they were in education.
In 2008, as global financial markets teetered, she took a leap that would come to define her approach to leadership: she left the stability of teaching to enter the volatile world of financial services.
“I thought, what’s the worst that can happen? I can go back to teaching if it doesn’t work out,” she recalls.
It was, by any measure, a bold move — joining a major insurer in a business development role at the height of economic uncertainty. Her first manager saw raw potential rather than sector experience, telling her she’d be either his greatest recruitment success or his most spectacular failure. Determined to prove herself, Ralitsa attacked the challenge head-on, mastering financial planning, setting records, and discovering, as she puts it, “a part of me I never knew existed.”
That leap set the tone for a career defined by curiosity and reinvention. She doubled down on expertise, earning the prestigious CII Chartered Financial Planner designation and a Cambridge leadership credential — both symbols of a deep commitment to continuous learning and professional integrity. From there, she stepped into consulting at EY, trading the security of industry roles for the breadth and challenge of advisory work. Even as an established executive, she went back to school again, completing a Technology MBA at Hult International Business School to stay fluent in a world where business and emerging technologies — especially AI — were colliding.
“Humility fuels my drive to keep learning. I am forever curious,” she says
Those instincts are critical to her work today helping the world’s largest insurers reimagine their futures through co-creation and AI.
“My greatest privilege is to design with, not just for, our clients,” she says.
That mindset has helped her pioneer a new model of collaboration at Kyndryl — one that treats global carriers as unified partners rather than regional accounts. The result is faster delivery, tighter integration, and higher engagement across teams. And by embedding agentic AI into the way work gets done, she’s not only transforming outcomes — she’s redefining how progress itself is achieved.
That work is especially important today within the insurance sector, which is collectively facing a defining choice: to merely adapt to AI or to architect a future around it. As part of her work at Kyndryl, the distinction isn’t semantic — it’s strategic.
“We’re not adapting. We’re architecting our solutions with AI at the core. AI-native isn’t a buzzword here; it’s the blueprint,” Ralitsa says.
Under her leadership, Kyndryl’s work with insurers has centered around building AI-native value propositions that go beyond automation to create entirely new ways of operating. Powered by enterprise-grade engineering, insurance domain expertise and Kyndryl’s proprietary agentic AI framework, this approach helps insurers reimagine their businesses from the ground up, where human expertise and digital intelligence evolve together.
The result is a next generation of capability that orchestrates, secures, and scales an insurer’s entire technology footprint into an agentic AI system — one that accelerates time to value, deepens resilience, and enables organizations to innovate at the pace of change itself.
Reinvention has been a constant in Ralitsa’s own career. Today, she’s helping some of the biggest players in the insurance industry do the same in the era of AI — leaning into the idea of rethinking the art of the possible.
A leadership philosophy built on trust
Ralitsa Nenkova describes herself as a transformational leader — someone who thrives on change, disruption, and guiding teams toward new visions. Throughout her career, she’s deliberately chosen roles that require growth and reinvention, not maintenance. For her, transformation means aligning minds and energies through turbulence to create something fundamentally new.
At Kyndryl, she applies that philosophy to the work of building an AI-native consulting organization — one that blends strategic clarity with situational flexibility. She sets direction, then adapts her style to context: providing structure where new teams need clarity, coaching where capability is still forming, and granting autonomy where maturity is high. The anchor, she says, is trust. “You’ve got to trust your team and enable them to succeed.”
Recognition is her accelerant. Wins are celebrated publicly, and talent is promoted visibly — not for ceremony, but to build momentum. “People move faster when they feel seen,” she says, echoing her early experience as an educator who understood the power of encouragement.
Operating globally also demands what she calls cultural intelligence — the ability to flex pace, tone, and hierarchy to different markets and teams. “No two teams, no two challenges, are identical. Adaptability is everything,” she says. That adaptability was forged through experience. As an Eastern European woman who became a single parent when her daughter was twelve, Ralitsa Nenkova learned early how to meet bias head-on and convert friction into focus. She has since led women’s networks, contributed to DEI councils, and mentored emerging leaders — not for optics, but for outcomes. “Diverse teams design for a wider world. And insurance, more than most sectors, serves everyone,” she notes.
Mentorship has also played a defining role in her story. Her first boss in financial services helped instill the growth mindset that still drives her today. And her first CEO at MetLife, Dominic Grinstead, has remained a trusted advisor for more than fifteen years.
“I still take his advice about my career progression. Every time I’ve made a change, we’ve talked about what would stretch me next and what kind of challenge would help me grow,” she says.
James Tufts, a senior EY partner, was also instrumental in teaching her consulting skills at EY. Those enduring relationships, among others, have shaped how she now mentors others, blending candor with care and using guidance as a catalyst for confidence.
Having benefited from strong mentors herself, Ralitsa Nenkova now pays it forward — guiding high-potential leaders in her teams and among her clients. Her advice is consistent: cultivate a growth mindset, seek sponsorship as well as feedback, and take the leap before you feel ready.
“Women are outstanding under pressure persuasive, resourceful yet often reluctant to self-advocate. Be bold, and do it with humility,” she says.
What makes her leadership so relevant now isn’t the résumé — it’s the model. Insurers don’t just need more tools; they need leaders who can turn strategy into execution, execution into habits, and habits into measurable results. That mindset — clarity of vision, autonomy in execution, and adaptability in practice — is exactly what the AI era demands. As AI moves from pilot to practice, it’s transforming how work gets done: centering on human–agent collaboration and measuring success by outcomes and energy, not just efficiency. Ralitsa Nenkova embodies that shift — a leader whose own story of reinvention mirrors the one she’s now helping an entire industry achieve.
Advice for the next generation of leaders
For emerging women leaders, Ralitsa Nenkova offers hard-won wisdom. First, cultivate a growth mindset, nothing stays static, especially in technology. Second, be bold.
“Women still suffer from imposter syndrome and think, ‘Am I ready? Just take the leap,” she observes. Leaders need to be persuasive storytellers and architects of the future.
She encourages women in showcasing their strengths in crisis decision-making and influence areas where women excel but often downplay. She also says it is equally important to become comfortable with sponsorship and self-advocacy.
“Men tend to be great at it and women don’t. We need to feel comfortable with that, done humbly. Women are outstanding under pressure, persuasive, resourceful, yet often reluctant to seek sponsorship or self-promotion,” she says. Finally, she urges continued challenging of stereotypes and the status quo.
“The status quo is still nowhere near where it needs to be on diversity and equity parameters. We owe this to our children as well,” she insists. Her call to action is direct: Embrace boldness, challenge stereotypes, and know your worth.
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