A Successful Shifting Gears Breakfast Seminar, July 8th 2019

A Successful Shifting Gears Breakfast Seminar, July 8th 2019

Montoux and Deloitte kicked off the work week the right way at the latest Shifting Gears breakfast seminar in Sydney this Monday. The event welcomed insurance industry professionals for an early morning breakfast and coffee to discuss the latest in product and pricing within the life insurance industry. 

The seminar kicked off with an energetic and dynamic presentation from Shelley Cox, Director of Customer Success at Montoux, who discussed how to optimize value for customers, advisers, and shareholders through life insurance retention. Drawing on her extensive experience at AMP, where she led an enterprise wide retention strategy that achieved a 25 percent reduction in lapse rates, Shelley shared her expertise on how to develop a sustainable retention strategy. 

She emphasized the importance of building culture and capability around retention, as well as shifting the issue into something everyone in the business wants to be apart. This, she explained, is fundamental in turning it into a strategic priority. 

Following Shelley’s presentation and a brief Q&A, Mathew Ayoub, Actuary Senior Manager at Deloitte Australia, took the stage to present on product development since the release of the Royal Commission report. Chief among his observations was that today’s changing regulatory environment is driving the financial services sector to shift the balance to a more customer centric way of doing business. In the insurance industry, this means modernizing the insurance product to ensure it remains relevant to the consumer throughout the life of the policy, not just in the event of a claim. 

The seminar’s final presentation of the morning featured a US-based call-in from Andy Gordon, Head of Individual Markets Life Insurance Product and Risk at Guardian Life. Despite a brief interruption by his kitchen smoke alarm, Andy discussed the future of life insurance products in the US market. Delving into the intensity of the US life insurance policy process, Andy stressed the importance of collaboration among data scientists, actuaries, and industry governance with respect to big data and its usage. 

Calling the modern insurance industry an ‘arms race of the simple and complex,’ he wrapped up his discussion by touching on the paradox between the desire for ‘simple’ client engagement processes combined with complex, deep-planning usage of data.

The seminar wrapped up around 9:30am, kickstarting the week with a unique and thoughtful discussion on product and pricing in Australia’s life insurance industry. 

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