Laura Deaner

CISO at Northwestern Mutual

2024 CODEIUM TECH LEADER: FINANCIAL SERVICES

Background

Laura Deaner became the Chief Information Security Officer at Northwestern Mutual in early 2021. She oversees the Enterprise Information Risk & Cybersecurity function and is responsible for driving cyber transformation across the company. She was previously the CISO at S&P Global.

Among Deaner’s priorities is to build personalized digital experience for customers in a secure way. Part of this strategy involves working with her teams to determine the best, most effective AI solutions for the cybersecurity organization, particularly in an environment with a lot of next-gen tools coming on the market. Deaner is also a thought leader in the cybersecurity industry and serves on the board of the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), in order to share the latest tactics and strategies for peer financial companies to combat threat actors.

“When we have breakthroughs like this in the field of artificial intelligence I think it's pretty cool, just from a scientific perspective. But I think like most things practicality is important. You have to understand the usage of something like ChatGPT. You have to work with your stakeholders and business partners - if a group in particular wants to use ChatGPT you have to understand what the use cases are, and it's also important to tag the output of anything that is not a human."

Disclaimer: These leaders are not affiliated with Codeium, nor do their inclusion in this group suggest any commercial relationship between their businesses and Codeium.