Mercury Insurance Appoints Simon Zhang as Chief Data Analytics Officer

(US and Canada) Mercury Insurance, a leading provider of property and casualty insurance, has appointed Simon Zhang to the newly created position of Chief Data and Analytics Officer. The hire continues Mercury's ongoing effort to utilize advanced data analytics to drive business growth, elevate the carrier's product offerings, and better meet the needs of its policyholders.

"This newly created position is the latest in a series of investments Mercury is making to reimagine how we use data and unlock the power of our deep data resources," said Victor Joseph, President and COO of Mercury Insurance. "Combining our proprietary data with the kinds of new data technologies that are being developed every day will help Mercury become an innovative market leader."

As Chief Data Analytics Officer, Zhang's leadership will add value to virtually every element of the Mercury data science landscape – from predictive analytics and data science, infrastructure, and architecture, to data security and compliance. 

Zhang's mission will be to harness Mercury's 60-plus years of valuable data and build systems and processes within the organization to better inform the way the company does business. As this data becomes more available across Mercury's teams, the company will discover better and more efficient ways of doing business.

"Data is only valuable if it's accessible and relevant. The aim of my team will be to map our data and present it in a way that can be of use to all members of the Mercury team – from product planning and customer service to human capital, marketing, and underwriting," said Zhang.

Before joining Mercury, Zhang served as Chief Data Scientist at GrowingIO, a company he co-founded. Prior to that, he held a leadership role at LinkedIn, where he served as senior director of business analytics. Interestingly, Zhang's career journey began in the medical field, where he achieved success as a neurosurgeon performing more than 300 surgeries.