Partners Life – The Road Ahead

Partners Life’s new CEO, Michael Weston, will be drawing on the past and the present as he formulates his priorities and plots the future direction of the insurer.

In seeking a strong personal connection with the Kiwi adviser community, Weston’s agenda appears to include respecting the fundamentals which presently underpin the insurer’s service relationship with advisers and consumers, working towards improving those fundamentals and maintaining its relevance for both advisers and consumers in a changing world.

As advisers around the country, together with Partners Life staff and other industry peers are gaining their first impression of him, Weston told Riskinfo his own first impression of the New Zealand financial services community is that it is very relationship-driven.

In the first months in his role replacing Naomi Ballantyne as Partners Life CEO, he says he has found his peers across the industry to have been extraordinarily generous with their time and in assisting him connect with the broader sector – in the interests of having a healthy level of competition as well as having a productive and strong industry as a whole.

Weston says he has “…had a lot of fun learning and listening to perspectives” from advisers and other industry colleagues in getting their take on both the challenges and opportunities presented by the New Zealand life insurance market.

This has been a strong focus for the new CEO in the first four months of his tenure, being to meet as many financial advisers as possible, to thank them for their ongoing support and to frame a picture of what the insurer is doing well and – as importantly – how it can improve.

In addition to prioritising meeting with as many advisers as he can, he has also been meeting with regulators and key business partners, “…so that we can start to form a view of the strategic themes we want to consider in taking the business forward.”

Culture and values

One of the challenges Weston faces is managing the culture within Partners Life. He reflects that the company’s culture has changed over time as the business has grown. He cites, for example, the acquisition of BNZ Life, which grew the number of staff by one third overnight (see: BNZ Completes Sale…). He says the BNZ acquisition brought new ways of thinking and new skills to Partners Life, all of which have contributed to cultural change at the insurer.

We do celebrate the individual, which is an important part of who we are…

He says the values foundation on which the company has built remain consistent, noting his experience is that organisations with positive cultures are those which reflect relatively consistent and relevant values: “And they tend to use them as part of the decision framework for how they think about their strategy and the choices they need to make in the market.”

Weston says Partners Life will remain a customer-centric company, but one which will also remain restless and always be seeking to innovate: “We do celebrate the individual, which is an important part of who we are as a collective, but also as a group of individuals who need to turn up every day. I don’t see our values changing but I know the culture will inevitably evolve.”

He says some of that evolution relates to the people who work at Partners Life; some is about the environment in which they operate, and some is about the current and future needs of the Partners Life customers and advisers and working towards satisfying those needs.

He makes the point that the company’s culture was already evolving during Ballantyne’s tenure, the custodianship of which has now been passed to him.

Legacy

Weston admits one of his challenges is following the legacy left by his predecessor, who built deep relationships with many advisers over a long period of time and, together with other key industry luminaries, developed the wider life insurance ecosystem that exists in New Zealand today.

“That’s something I can’t just step into,” he admitted, conceding he needs to invest in that relationship building and get some of his own runs on the board while continuing to maintain the fundamentals he says Ballantyne did so well, including:

• Being approachable
• Listening properly
• Taking on feedback

Weston adds another strength of Ballantyne’s he is seeking to emulate is working for the benefit of the broader life insurance ecosystem and the consumer as a whole, while always having the Partners Life brand position in mind.

His agenda includes being accessible to all advisers and other industry colleagues and he literally hit the ground running in just the second week of his tenure, embarking on a national tour to meet advisers.

…how do we get more feedback about what is and isn’t working…

This was followed by his joining the recent mySolutions regional roadshow and hosting the 2024 Partners Life Conference in May, which offered him additional opportunities to get to know as many advisers and other industry colleagues as possible.

The issues

Working in partnership with advisers, advice businesses and FAPs is a strong message Weston says he has received during his early engagement with the sector, which reflects his initial thoughts around his sense that the industry in New Zealand is very relationship-driven.

Three key elements of working in partnership with advisers and the consumer he highlighted at the Partners Life Conference included:

• Continuing to be advocates for financial literacy and creating access to good advice
• Being continually easier to do business with, which helps advisers spend more of their time focussed on the things that are most valuable to them, whether that means building their business or maintaining their inforce book
• Creating feedback loops: “For every interaction we have, how do we get more feedback about what is and isn’t working – and feed that back into a continuous cycle as it relates to being easier to do business with.”

The CEO emphasises one of the cornerstones supporting the insurer’s mantra of ‘ease of doing business’ includes the fact the insurer has no legacy technology and operates on a single platform for policy administration, a single platform for claims and a set of integrated platforms managing the new business process.

He says this represents a technology advantage, but one which can be built on further, such as better utilising data to deliver useful information for advisers on future new business leads or triggers for life stage events, creating more valuable and closer relationships between adviser and client.

New ownership

Weston sees the new owner of Partners Life, global mega insurer, Dai-ichi Life, as a great fit for the insurer as it brings significant global insurance experience and expertise to New Zealand shores, which in turn presents opportunities for Partners Life to benefit from that extensive global experience and expertise.

He says it also offers opportunities to work with other insurers within the group to benefit by sharing the challenges and opportunities each has experienced.

Examples include how to address similar needs across different jurisdictions such as:

• Simplifying policy wording
• Smoothing underwriting flow
• Optimising new business processes

Having worked in Australia and within the Asian market prior to joining Partners Life, his perspective allows him to reflect that the underwriting process in New Zealand is different from that which exists in Asia.

“In Asia it’s generally driven to help people arrive at choices around pricing outcomes, where the level and detail of information provided at new business time informs the extent to which a more extensive set of cover options can be offered or the extent to which pricing can be reduced.

…we certainly feel confident around our new business and underwriting solutions…

“This contrasts somewhat with New Zealand, where the underwriting process considers eligibility and what loadings or exclusions will apply.”

Capital support from Dai-ichi Life is another significant benefit for Partners Life, which will ultimately allow the insurer to fund growth in New Zealand, he says.

The future

Weston notes the pandemic significantly accelerated the digitisation of the life insurance industry out of the need to continually serve customers and the need to also create customer awareness of the importance of insurance and the need to be able to write new business remotely or in a paperless manner.

“I think that Partners Life is certainly leading the way in that space, and we certainly feel confident around our new business and underwriting solutions.”

He added some clear themes were coming through in terms of product development, such as how product offers need to be simpler and how to offer more affordability options. He cited recent changes to the Partners Life trauma product from an affordability perspective, which he says have engaged well with advisers and their clients, and which informs the insurer’s agenda to develop new affordability options across other product lines.

One of the other challenges for Weston from a product perspective is how to address the underinsurance dilemma which exists in New Zealand: “We need to think about how to address those parts of the market that are currently unserved.”

Adviser representation

In his meetings with advisers so far, Weston has been impressed by the diversity in both age and gender, but says adviser mentoring programmes remain of critical importance.

“You can’t address the protection gap without a strong and diverse adviser force to explain and deliver what are a relatively complex range of products to meet a diverse range of customer needs,” he says.

…advisers are critically important both to the consumer and to ourselves…

“So, making sure we develop an adviser community which is representative of the different types of people in New Zealand society is critically important.”

Summary

Bringing together some of the key priorities he has identified in the early months of his custodianship of Partners Life, Weston stressed the importance of:

• Seeking to design customer-centric solutions that are relevant
• Making sure that we are always leading in terms of innovation, particularly in terms of product innovation
• Making sure we continue with our policy of no legacy technology
• Continuing to be easy to do business with
• Advocating for financial literacy and for greater access to advice
• Working with adviser networks to build in the feedback loops

“Those are the things that are core to what we have always been and will stay core.”

Message to advisers

In prioritising the development of feedback loops with adviser networks, Weston says this is a critical element in the partnering relationship he is seeking to build and which forms one of his key message to advisers: “…number one – that advisers are critically important both to the consumer and to ourselves and that we thank them for their ongoing support.

“Whether it’s accessibility or approachability I’m looking forward to building those relationships.”