Heather H. Wilson

Chief Executive Officer CLARA Analytics

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Heather H. Wilson is Chief Executive Officer of CLARA Analytics, an AI-as-a-service company serving property and casualty insurers, third-party administrators and self-insured organisations. The problem CLARA addresses is that the cost of a casualty claim is decided long before anyone realises it: most of the money in workers’ compensation and liability claims is consumed by a small minority of files that go badly, and the signals that a file is turning up in unstructured text — medical records, bills, adjuster notes — rather than in the structured fields insurers actually monitor. CLARA applies natural language processing and image recognition to that material to surface deteriorating claims early enough to intervene. Wilson is unusually well matched to the problem. She was among the first generation of enterprise chief data officers, holding the title at Citigroup and then as AIG’s first-ever CDO, and later served as Chief Data Scientist and Head of Artificial Intelligence at L Brands, which means she has run both the insurance-side data estate and the applied AI function that CLARA now sells into.

Career Highlights

• Appointed Chief Executive Officer of CLARA Analytics in June 2021.
• Served as AIG’s first-ever Chief Data Officer, owning the enterprise data programme in the years following the financial crisis, and was named Insurance Woman of the Year by the Insurance Technology Association.
• Chief Data Officer and Global Head of Decision Management at Citigroup.
• Global Head of Innovation and Advanced Technology at Kaiser Permanente.
• Executive Vice President, Chief Data Scientist and Head of Artificial Intelligence at L Brands from 2016 to 2020.
• Independent director of Equifax from February 2019 to October 2023, serving on the Audit and Technology Committees.
• Appointed to the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Research Advisory Committee in 2015.
• Named one of “10 Women Leaders Everyone Should Know” in 2022.

Professional Journey

Wilson’s career began with an unusual amount of international exposure. She graduated summa cum laude from Shenandoah University with a business administration degree in international business, concentrating on Japanese and Russian linguistics, and was the first student at the university to study abroad — at Nanzan University in Nagoya as a Rotary Scholar, and at the International University of Moscow. She started an export-import business selling consumer products into Moscow during her final year as an undergraduate.

She built her professional reputation in financial services data. At Citigroup she was Chief Data Officer and Global Head of Decision Management, then moved to Kaiser Permanente as Global Head of Innovation and Advanced Technology, crossing from banking into healthcare. In 2012 AIG made her its first-ever Chief Data Officer, a role created in the aftermath of the financial crisis when the insurer’s ability to see its own exposures had become a matter of existential importance. She held it for four years and was named Insurance Woman of the Year by the Insurance Technology Association. In 2015 the U.S. Treasury appointed her to its Financial Research Advisory Committee.

From 2016 she was at L Brands as Executive Vice President, Chief Data Scientist and Head of Artificial Intelligence — a retail environment rather than a regulated financial one, and a role focused on applying machine learning to commercial decisions rather than on governing a data estate.

In February 2019 she joined the board of Equifax as an independent director, serving on the Audit and Technology Committees during the period when the credit bureau was rebuilding after its 2017 data breach. She resigned from that board effective 17 October 2023, with Equifax reporting that the decision reflected other commitments rather than any disagreement with the company.

CLARA Analytics named her Chief Executive Officer on 16 June 2021. The appointment brought together the two halves of her background: a career spent building data capability inside insurers, and a later career spent applying machine learning commercially. At CLARA she leads a company whose whole proposition is that the unstructured documentation surrounding a claim contains more predictive signal than the structured claim record itself.

Education

Shenandoah University

Bachelor of Business Administration, International Business, with a focus on Japanese and Russian linguistics; graduated summa cum laude

Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan

Study abroad as a Rotary Scholar

International University of Moscow

Study abroad