Hiroko Kowada (AOA):

Hi, good morning and good afternoon and good evening everyone. I’d like to welcome you all and thank everyone for coming here, AOA webinar. Today, over 100 people, not only Asia and Oceania, but also over the world. I’m happy to share same topics at the same time through online. Before opening, I’d like to introduce myself and main staff of this webinar. I’m Hiroko Kowada, Executive AOA Secretary. And today’s event chief director, my colleague, Tsutomu Matsubara.

Here, I’d love to show you today’s program. The theme is innovation and flexible working style in response to current changing environment. After opening, Fumio Yanai, AOA Chair has an opening address. And then presentation from three fantastic speakers.

The first speaker is Ms. Jackelyn Ballena, on behalf of 1CISP in the Philippines. And she will talk about 1CISP’s commitment to new normal under the motto “People first”. Jackie, please.

Jackelyn Ballena:

Wonderful. Hey, everyone. So as Hiroko mentioned, the title of this presentation is “People First: The Way to Succeed”.

But first, allow me just thank AOA for inviting 1CISP to share our People first initiatives for 2020. The year when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. People in this discussion will be our employees, our agents, and our stakeholders. Let’s learn together how we protected each one and the teams who provided our services in this new normal.

The agenda for this morning, first, we’ll give you a brief background about 1CISP, what do we do. And then, a preview of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines. What were the different initiatives by the government and how is the Philippines right now in terms of the dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and how 1CISP was affected by this different decisions, and how 1CISP responded to the different things that happened in 2020. How we protected our best assets, which are our employees, our agents and of course our customers. How we have embraced this new normal and how we look beyond the call.

So to start off, let me introduce 1CISP or 1 Cooperative Insurance System of the Philippines Life and General Insurance. We are a composite insurance based in the Philippines, and has been serving the Filipinos for the past 47 years. So 1CISP was organized in 1974 to promote and engage in life insurance services as a cooperative. But in 2018, 1CISP was given authority to become a life and non-life insurance cooperative as it acquired a non-life company to provide non-life services.

At present, 1CISP is operating nationwide in the Philippines, but it’s head office based in Quezon City, which is part of the National Capital Region. One of the areas strictly hit by COVID-19 here in the Philippines. We also have one branch office in Mindanao and 16 satellite offices across the country. The insurer, mostly farmers and the low-income sector Filipinos, and at present, we have 2,962 cooperative members already as part of the 1CISP family.

In terms of our direction, 1CISP envisions to insure three million Filipinos by 2025. And I think we’ll be reaching that, given that we are also half of the number that we’re actually targeting as of 2020. We want to be a viable and socialized cooperative insurance services that protects and empowers Filipinos, especially those who have less in life. So that is the mission of 1CISP. And to be able to keep that 1CISP keeps with its vision and mission, the values of 1CISP are commitment to reliability, under-promise, over-deliver, mutual prosperity and excellent service are always exercised actively. Among our board of directors, our management, and staff and our agents from quality corporation to service delivery.

1CISP offers a wide range of products both for life and non-life. And last year actually, despite the pandemic, 1CISP was able to launch four new products. And one of the products that we’re most proud of, probably will be the ones wherein we insure those that are beyond the standard eligible age, especially, given the pandemic wherein a lot of those senior citizens have been impacted by the COVID-19. So promotion of these new products have been possible with the use of technology.

Now, let me walk you through how COVID-19 pandemic affected the Philippines. And the screen that you see there are lot of numbers. So what are those numbers? How are they relevant to the COVID-19 in the Philippines?

The first number that you see there, it’s a date, in the first box, it’s March 13, 2020. So last year, that was the date wherein the Philippine government has declared an enhanced community quarantine in the Philippines, from March 17 to April 4TH. So enhanced community quarantine is similar to lockdown still for other countries. But after that one, it has evolved its name from enhanced community quarantine to a more relaxed, different quarantines.

So 631,320 Filipinos were affected by the COVID-19 where it considered as positive cases of COVID-19. That is as of March 16, 2020. But as of March 29, 2021, 731,894 were already affected of the COVID-19 virus. 560,736 or 88.8% recovered from the COVID-19 virus. 57,736 or 9.1% are the active cases as of March 16, 2021. But as of the present, 15.8% is the percentage of active cases of COVID-19 in the Philippines. It has increased dramatically over the past 13 days putting the National Capital Region and its nearby areas actually into an enhanced community quarantine.

For all the employees 1CISP right now are reporting to its main office in Quezon City. So we are reporting work from home right now because of the ECQ again that was declared from March 29 to April 4, 2021. As of March 16, 2021; 12,848 died due to COVID-19 here in the Philippines. Increasing that data to 30,186 as of March 29, 2021.

Although, the number is very high in terms of infected of the COVID-19 virus, 96.6% based on the March 16 data are just mild cases. As of the March 29, 2021 data, 95.9% are considered to be mild cases out of the 731,894 COVID-19 cases here in the Philippines.

The five million that you see there in the box, are the number of Filipinos who lost their job because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is the data based on DOLE. But on other surveys, if we’re going to look into it over the net, it says that 12 million Filipinos lost their jobs. So probably this is who lost their jobs temporarily, or who have reduced their income or salary because their work is not Monday to Friday, it has been reduced already. And the 3.5% number that you see in there is the inflation rate of the Philippines as of December 2020.

Here on the next slide, you see different terms related to the COVID-19 pandemic. New normal, so when the pandemic broke out I think everybody has to live to this new normal. Everybody has to hand sanitize wherever they go right now. And they have to practice social distancing also because of the COVID-19 pandemic. To ensure that we will not be able to transmit the virus. In the Philippines, face mask and face shields are a must. Whenever you go out, whenever you dine-in or whenever you are inside your office premises, it is a requirement to wear your face mask and face shield.

Aside from that, its virtual meetings and online transactions have been very prevalent as well due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And I think one of the things that broke out as well as the result of the pandemic are different mental health problems that had to be addressed as well by the different organizations because of these abrupt changes.

Now let me walk you through the different responses of 1CISP due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So as mentioned earlier, we have protected our best assets. We have embraced the new normal, and we went beyond the call. So how did we care for our employees? How did you care for your employees during the pandemic?

For 1CISP, we have in here PROTECT, we provide existing salaries and benefits. No diminution during the pandemic. We reviewed plans, policies and procedures and adjust accordingly, and of course, one of the things that we had to adjust appropriately is our work-from-home setup. It has not been available to 1CISP prior to the pandemic. Although we have been trying to experiment on a work set up before like six hours working, if it will be available. We have offered relevant assistance. We trained using alternative platform. So we basically engaged with our employees using different online platforms. We engage with our employees, we communicate and we think beyond our organization.

How did we implement our work-from-home arrangement? First, we crafted a work-from-home guidelines. We discuss impact of work-from-home arrangement. We determine positions, physical for work-from-home arrangement and we determine means to monitor productivity. We also have provided internet allowance to our employees who are on a work-from-home set up. So we have to survey first how much was their internet expense brought about by doing work from home and then crafted necessary our recommendation and guidelines for this provision of the internet allowance. And when the community quarantines were a bit relaxed already, so we were able to distribute already the desktops and laptops of our employees into their homes.

When our employees wanted to go back around October, which is already like 50% of ours are reporting alternately. So we demanded strictly safety protocols to our employees. So before entry, just like the other organizations, we have to fill out health declaration forms. We have temperature checks, we have face masks and face shields required while you are in the office premises. Inside the work premises, we have hand sanitizers and alcohols all over the workplace. We ask our employees to sanitize their work areas aside from the sanitation being done every after work by our maintenance.

We remind employees to wash their hands often. Employees are expected to practice social distancing. Employees must eat on their work areas and ensure that it’s properly cleaned after. This is to avoid being together to ensure social distancing. Virtual meetings are encouraged over face-to-face meetings. Gatherings are not allowed and receiving of customers and our guests inside work premises are limited to a certain number.

In terms of employee engagement, although we have worked digitally, we ensure that we are still connected with our employees. So we had monthly virtual meetings. We also had our virtual Christmas party. We also ensure that we have continuously trained our employees. So we have conducted various trainings for them, not just on the skill side, but also on different prevalent issues like of course safety protocols on the issue of data privacy and protection, and healthy eatings, and lifestyle webinar. We also had our continuous HR orientation.

Our agents also continuously change during the 2020 pandemic. They went through a three-month Basic Entrepreneurial Sales Training or BEST. And this has been supported by the top management of 1CISP.

How did the embrace the new normal? We have implemented a lot of new policies and procedures. We have accepted electronic copies of remittances, both for our remittances and claims documents. We have extended grace period for payments. We have extended as well as acceptance and compliance periods for claims documents and payments for claims benefits has been through online. As we have done it always through cheque.

What other initiatives that we do? Deaths due to COVID-19 we’re actually declared payable for 1CISP. We had different campaigns. We had Hospital Income Benefit that we had to double for a limited period of time. If the confinement is due to COVID-19, we had additional benefits also is given if that is due to COVID-19. For our non-life, automatic renewals we’re done. We also have extension of loan payments for our cooperatives who have loans. We also extended the insurance coverages for our loan payment protection insurance, and we continuously distributed our Interest on Capital, Patronage Refund and Experience Refund.

Also in 1CISP last year, we have our annual general assembly virtually. We done it virtually. The registration was done online. The assembly itself was conducted virtually, as well as the election of board of directors and members. I’m sorry, I see a raise of hand from [Whity 00:17:24] is there… Okay. So I’ll just continue. Going beyond the call. These are the different 1CISP initiatives. One of the things that we did to be able to engage with our members is to show our appreciation to them. In 1CISP Facebook page, we have these shout-outs to our members. So we try to look into their websites and shout-out to our members. What are the different initiatives of other member cooperatives of 1CISP.

Aside from that one, we also did a survey of how we can actually help our members. We conducted our virtual Owner’s Forum on each island group. We have conducted Owners Forum for the past years on a province level. So eight to 12 Owners Forum. This is our way of updating our members, owners in different areas of the Philippines and those who are not able to attend our general assemblies will still be updated. So for last year, we have done it virtually to Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao. We have also launched our new products and we have done our underwriting and claims orientation virtually. And our member-coops were actually provided various webinars.

We have also engaged with our members by staying relevant in social media. So whenever there are new close deals, so we tried to post it so that everybody will be updated. We also tried to be with our member-coops in their milestones. Like the one that you see in that picture, are during their first anniversary as a branch. So we post it in our social media page as well.

We have launch as well, last year various advocacy campaigns. So for the young leaders last year, we had launched #KwentoKo campaign and #KwentongKoop campaign. We have also been involved with the Go-Green campaign of ICA. We have also launched last year our Digi-Coop platform. So this is a platform of 1CISP, so that transactions between coop and 1CISP will be more seamless. It is also an ecosystem wherein 1CISP will be able to connect more with its co-operatives, and cooperatives will be able to connect more with each other.

So as part of the different initiatives of 1CISP last year, we had various partnerships with different institutions last year to be able to provide meaningful webinars to our member cooperatives, so that they’d be able to cope with a COVID-19 pandemic. So these are just samples of the webinars we had for our member cooperatives. So we had Safety Protocols at Work. We had People + Technology webinar series, which is more on leadership development and putting people and technology. We have Malasakit and Compassionate Leadership during COVID-19, which is very important. Developing the leaders in new, especially during the new normal. We also have how to market products in succeed during the pandemic. Getting to know their borrowers, especially for our credit cooperatives and then Credit and Liquidity Stress Testing.

Our president have been very active as well with different invitations from different organizations to share our best practices, share our innovation practices as well.

What has been our takeaways for this COVID-19 pandemic? First, take care of your people and they will take care of the business. We have always believed on that one. Our people have worked hard despite all the limitations and all the challenges that they are experiencing. And 1CISP was able to thrive with the pandemic in 2020. Be flexible and act fast. Reinvent yourself. I think this has been proven with the different policies and procedures that we had to actually change. Focus on top priorities. Digital transformation is a must. This is the reason why we have actually created the Digi-Coop platform. Engage our customers. Communication is the key. So it’s important to stay relevant to your customers and continuously engaging them, even if you are virtually. Develop partnerships, cooperations, especially at critical points. And the last one is staying relevant.

That’s all, thank you so much for taking time to listen to our presentation.

Hiroko Kowada (AOA):

Next speaker is Mr. Pete Frizzell, on behalf of FMG in New Zealand. He will talk about moving from lockdown to the new normal for flexible working. Pete, please.

Pete Frizzell:

I will speak about flexible working and how that has worked at FMG as we moved in New Zealand into lockdown and then back out again over the last year. So I’ll start by giving a bit of context about FMG and who we are, then I’ll talk about the New Zealand journey. So what happened in New Zealand with COVID-19 and how we navigated through that. I’ll then talk about the FMG story. So what we did at FMG to help work through COVID, and with different working through lockdown, and then how we navigated that as we route came out of lockdown and return to the new normal, not back to normal. I don’t think any of us are going back to what was before COVID.

FMG, we are a mutual that has been around for 116 years, or just over 116 years. We’re actually enshrined by an act of parliament. So there’s an act in New Zealand called the FMG Act, which protects the mutual. And that really reflects the importance of farming and growing to New Zealand and the New Zealand economy. It is our biggest exporter and we’re very much an export-driven economy.

Over 53% of farmers and growers within New Zealand insure with FMG. So that’s our coordination. Our core purpose for many years has been and remains to provide a bit of deal for rural New Zealand. We’ve got just over 750 employees. And our gross income has just popped over the 400 million New Zealand dollar back. I won’t try and convert that to other currencies, you can do that separately. That’s FMG. As the image shows, we’re spread right throughout the country.

The other thing which is maybe a little bit different about FMG is that we have a fully proprietary model, which means that we sell and service all of our products. So we don’t work through brokers, which we feel works quite well, because that means we control the entire life cycle for the client.

In New Zealand, being a little bit remote from the rest of the world, COVID reached here a little bit later. The second person that actually brought COVID-19 into New Zealand was in early March. That person, I guess, unfortunately for FMG, one of our employees was a close contact. Sat within a row of them on an airplane. So we got to be a very early adopter within the New Zealand model, because that employee was on their way to a regional meeting with 200 of our employees. So we were learning, I guess, if we cast our minds back to the beginning of COVID-19, the idea about isolation, keeping good sanitation and social distancing was really quite foreign to a lot of people. So we were learning that on the fly very quickly as the pandemic started to really emerge, and then as it grew exponentially in New Zealand and around the world.

As you see from the dates on the slide, the pandemic progressed incredibly quickly. So by the 26th of March, the New Zealand government put the country into one of the earliest, and I say earliest with respect to the number of infections that have occurred relative to the population. So it was one of the earliest and hardest lockdowns in the developed nations of the world. And by hardest, I mean, it was very much everyone was staying in their home. You were only allowed out to make specific trips to get patrol or go to the supermarket, and only essential services such as medical or police staff were allowed to go out to do their jobs.

We had a four alert levels, so that was alert level four, the highest level. We navigated through that from the 26th of March. I guess the good thing from a New Zealand perspective is that a really hard and early lockdown meant that we were in lockdown for a much shorter period of time. New Zealand did take a different approach from many other countries in the world, noting that being an island nation, we had the opportunity to take a different approach.

We targeted eliminating COVID-19 from within the country, which was successfully achieved, which was very helpful. So New Zealand has had, I think it’s 26 now, fatalities, so it still did have an impact, but I think it’s fair to say nowhere near as big an impact as in many other countries. So that high level of compliance from the New Zealand population, we would refer to it as the team of 5 million, meant that we had a lockdown of less than two months.

And then from the 14th of May last year, we actually were able to exit their lockdown and most employees were able to return to work. And that was called alert level two, which was like back to normal with some restrictions around physical distancing and other things like that.

Then a few weeks later, we actually moved back to alert level one. And that was the point at which we were able to have crowds back to the rugby games and stadiums, and actually really, in effect, operate as close to normal as you could be without any restrictions whatsoever.

So since June, we’ve still had three short-term regional lockdowns, and those have all been in the Auckland region, which is our biggest city up towards the top of the country. And those have been through incursions or from infection coming in through the border. So border controls have been hugely important for New Zealand because in effect, we’ve eradicated or eliminated COVID-19 within the wider population. So the borders have been our main area to be very vigilant, to make sure that it doesn’t come back in. So far, through some great work from a lot of people, and no doubt a bit of fortune, we’ve managed to keep COVID-19 out so far. Which has meant that from an organizational perspective, we’ve really navigated that journey back out of lockdown, and how do we operate in this new normal as we talk about that.

What did that mean for FMG and our employees? First of all, I think it’s good to acknowledge that that period from 26 of March to 14th of May, we were very clear that we’re saying that is not flexible working, because in actual fact, all of our employees had to work from home. There was absolutely no choice whatsoever. So that was enforced, working from home. Schools were also closed, so that really created quite a lot of impact. That was probably one of the biggest impacts on employees’ ability to able to fulfill their roles normally.

We had to make a number of changes very quickly on the fly. Jacqueline talked to similar things like some of the technology teams did an incredible job about ensuring people had the technology to work from home. Initially we couldn’t take incoming client phone calls from home and we implemented a new solution to enable that within two weeks so that we were, in effect, operating as normal in a remote way. Obviously, we couldn’t go and visit clients throughout the lockdown period.

I guess the other reflection for me was it really highlighted the importance of communication throughout that time as well. So the communication and really, the people leaders in our communication team did a fantastic job, making sure that our people stayed connected as much as possible as we went through this process.

Overall, we assessed that we were at about 25% less than our full capacity for being able to service clients throughout that period. Helpfully, demand reduced as well, as you would expect through a lockdown. Interestingly, a lot of our farming and growing clients were still absolutely fully operational. They were still working, producing goods and services. Obviously, food is an essential good, and we were still exporting. And that is something that has protected the New Zealand economy throughout the massive impact that has happened from COVID-19.

We also had to transition a number of other things, like we ran our annual general meeting online and we transitioned a bunch of training, as I’m sure many others have, to an online environment very quickly. Through that all, I guess, the kind of catch cry or the mantra that we shared with employees was really around do your very best. So we just encouraged employees. We realized employees had lots of different situations. Some lived in houses that weren’t really suitable to work from. They didn’t have much space. Others had young children, which made it very difficult for them to actually work. So they needed to be supporting them through the day. We kind of extended that goodwill around like, if you’re doing your very best, that’s all we can possibly ask. And our employees responded fantastically well to that. So we navigated through very well when our clients service and employee engagement actually went up through the lockdown period, which was very pleasing to see.

From the 14th of May, as we moved into alert level two, we were able to then have a managed return to offices, noting that we needed to put a number of contingencies in place to allow for potential future lockdowns. Because, as I’m sure you’re all aware, it’s quite an extensive and expensive exercise moving your entire workforce back to work from home and then back into the office again, with quite a lot of logistical challenges around that.

One thing that I’m sure everyone has also experienced is that move into and out of lockdown, or in effect, working from home and then moving back into the office environment, partially or wholly, has created quite an increased desire for flexible working. Sorry, I’ll just take a drink.

What we did as a Mutual is first of all, we took a very principled approach to how we considered flexible working, and there’s the four principles up there at the top, really. So first of all, of course, the wellbeing and safety of our employees was paramount. So we didn’t want to be compromising wellbeing and safety at all. We also wanted to ensure that employee engagement isn’t compromised. Equally, that client servicing and engagement was maintained or improved, and that we didn’t introduce a brand new cost center to the Mutual without there being a requisite or an equal level of benefit provided as well. So we were very aware of those four considerations, noting that we saw sometimes that the things that individuals were looking to do maybe focused a little bit more on one area or another.

Another consideration as we started to look at flexible working and how we might implement that at the Mutual, was to be aware that we have three, you could say four really, but I think three covers it, distinct employee types with quite different requirements. We have our mobile sales and servicing and assessing teams that are distributed throughout New Zealand and are out in their cars all day, visiting clients and servicing them there. They have quite a bit of flexibility in how they schedule their day already, so they’ve got quite a different role to the other types of employees.

We have a number of phone-based clients, sales, advice and servicing roles. So those employees would need to be there, in effect, on the phone for set hours when we are actually providing that service to our clients. They have different needs from a flexibility requirement and as a Mutual, we have different needs on how and when they’re available to be able to service clients.

And then finally we have those shared service or corporate roles that actually provide the core services, such as finance and people and culture and the IT area, which then, to a greater or lesser extent, maybe have more possibility of being able to work in a flexible manner as we work forward, depending on which element of flexibility you’re looking at there.

What we did when we moved out of lockdown is we did have a number of exceptions or specific employees who had specific requirements, as I’m sure every organization has had that case for many years. So we treated those exceptions as something separate. Then we implemented, it was initially a six-month flexible working trial, but we extended it to eight months, as it took a month or two to get things implemented and settled down. That, in effect allowed about a sixth or a seventh of our workforce to regularly work from home, rather than looking for them to come right back into the office. And that was the information technology teams. Then we treat those other requests as by exceptions.

That trial’s due to finish in April, and what we’ve found is that it’s tracking very well so far. We’ve had a lot of those metrics and those metrics are based on those key criteria I talked about at the beginning of the slide, and they’re looking very, very positive. Interestingly, and again, as I’ve read from the literature, I think a lot of people have seen this, that maintaining connectivity and those relationships both within your team and with other teams has been highlighted as the biggest challenge. I think that’s something where we’re still working through how to help support that better.

For the trial, we set up a number of agreements and evaluation criteria to support good decision-making as we went forward. We wanted to be, as much as possible, consistent, but equally, we wanted to have the flexibility to be able to adapt to individual circumstances, which I think that is a lot of what some employees are looking for, is actually something that suits best for their circumstance, which we’re happy to support, where that also enables them to be a good member of the team, support the culture, and also provide an excellent service to our clients.

We have a policy, as you would expect, that is the underpinning document for flexible working arrangements. We also set up agreements with all employees who are regularly working from home. This is also quite important for the health and safety legislation in New Zealand. So that really documents what that flexible working agreement is. And with that is a wellbeing and safety checklist. That enables us to validate all necessary wellbeing and safety requirements have been addressed. And that also includes a virtual workplace assessment. That’s completed to make sure that the employee has an appropriate ergonomic chair and that they sit at the right height and all of those good things, so that we’re not… We did see a spike of wellbeing incidents early on, or a couple of months into lockdown, and I’m sure a number of others will have probably had that as well. So that proactive work around those assessments has really seen that drop off, which is great to see.

Then, we had that number of essential criteria. When you look at the criteria that’s evolved here, and we’re still evolving these. I won’t just run through all of those, but the key thing around that criteria, it’s really connecting back to those four principles that I talked about on the first page. So really, the checklist above was around ensuring wellbeing and safety. But then these other questions are just ensuring that actually, if we’re going to provide flexibility to an employee or a team of employees, are we ensuring that that will actually enhance their engagement so that they can stay connected and they can stay effective as a team? Because I think, as we’ve all seen, teams that are delivering and performing well tend to have better engagement as a result. The two things are quite tightly linked.

Equally, we’re absolutely clear that we don’t want to be compromising client service in any way, shape, or form. We need to make sure that they are great standards and the great service that we provide to our clients is maintained. And finally, that’s actually, we still want to have be operating as a profitable Mutual as that works through. So there’s a series of questions there that we found has worked at a baseline for us to be able to have flexibility in how we consider different requests. Some good examples are, there’s been some employees who’ve been with the Mutual a number of years and are very established in their role and very effective, who we’ve allowed to work in a different location, or have some other flexibility, whilst there’s been maybe some other employees who are still very good members of the Mutual, but maybe have only been there for 12 months or so, and maybe aren’t as established in their roles. So we’ve not provided quite as much flexibility for them because we don’t think it’ll actually serve them or the Mutual well to enable them to continue to perform at their best.

What are we doing next? What are our next steps? So we’ll be completing the trial at the end of April, and as we come to the end of that trial, we’re two streams of assessment, really. One is what to do post-trial for that information technology team. And I think the simple answer is, we will continue with a level of flexible, but we will continue to adjust and tweak and look to improve that. As I said earlier, we really want to see how we can make sure that we maintain that connectivity and those relationships. We really value that strong culture at FMG, and we don’t want to see that being compromised. Overall, the signs were very good. That team that went through the flexible working trial, their engagement has gone up as well as we’ve measured that through the trial, which is a really good sign.

We’re also, at the same time, I guess we’re taking the learnings from the trial and we’re looking at how do we want our approach flexible working for the whole organization? So what arrangements are we going to look to make available to other employee groups? And we’re talking about that as what are the above-the-line and maybe below-the-line things. What I mean by that is above-the-line is saying, “This is something that we want to make available to all employees. So you could talk to your manager about whatever that flexible working arrangement might be.” Whereas there may be some that we will consider below-the-line, which we would consider on an exception basis for specific employees, if they met some quite strict criteria. So we wouldn’t want to be advertising more broadly what those might be.

That’s where we’ve got to. We’ve been quite considered in how we’ve approached flexible working as we’ve navigated into and out of lockdown. We’ve tried very hard to communicate very clearly to our employees what we’re doing and how we are approaching it. Our latest engagement survey, which we did in February, showed, I think, that emphasize, there is no going back to where we were before. Almost all of our workforce force was office-based, but we’re absolutely seeing that as a good thing. I think if we can take the good stuff out of flexible working, but makes sure that we don’t compromise the great stuff that we had before, particularly those office-based environments, those casual conversations and those other interactions that you have are so important to overall productivity and performance, then we think it’s a really exciting future.

But as I said, from that engagement survey, one of the most commented items from employees was around a desire for more flexible working. So we realize that there is a real desire there. We’ll be working to support that.

That’s the end of my presentation. Thanks.

Hiroko Kowada (AOA):

Thank you, Pete. So there is one question from: any feedback from your clients, positive or negative, to the flexible working arrangement of your company?

Pete Frizzell:

Throughout lockdown, the feedback from our clients was very positive. In actual fact, we had a number of clients, they rang up expecting to leave a message, and they were quite pleasantly surprised that we were still actively servicing the phones and proactively calling them. So that worked very good.

The other elements, I guess that’s part of those key criteria that we look at as well. One of the things, when we agree to a flexible working arrangement, would be that it shouldn’t be impacting on clients at all. It shouldn’t be having a negative impact on clients. And that is what we’ve found so far. I guess success for us for flexible working is that clients would only see a maintaining or improvement in the service that they receive. So we definitely wouldn’t be putting in place arrangements where clients wouldn’t receive the same level of service, or they wouldn’t receive regular visits from our sales and service staff, like they’re currently have been.

That’s probably why we haven’t been receiving much feedback because we’ve worked quite hard to make it not visible, I guess, to clients.

Hiroko Kowada (AOA):

Oh yes, another question came. How has lockdown and remote working effected the development of new business in maintaining premium growth?

Pete Frizzell:

For FMG, throughout lockdown, we definitely had a slowdown of new business initially. Equally, at FMG we do have typically a high retention rate of over 94% retention that actually increased throughout lockdown to over 95%, and that has stayed. So what we’ve found is actually that that lockdown period has actually improved client retention, which is really pleasing to see.

And then since lockdown, we’ve actually found, and I think that’s probably part of us being a wholly New Zealand-owned insurer, there’s been a real trend within New Zealand of people almost seeking out local providers. So that’s played well for us. We’ve actually had very strong growth and retention over the last year. So things have gone very well, which was probably not what we were expecting. We really prepared for a lot more volatility. But equally, we’re aware that could still be to come in the coming year. I don’t think any of us thinks we’re remotely beyond the impact of COVID. But no, overalls, it’s actually gone really well.

Hiroko Kowada (AOA):

Thank you, Pete. So the next question come, but this is a Japanese, so I will translate that.

Pete Frizzell:

For main maintaining that good communication with our members of our teams from a people leader perspective, what we’ve really focused on initially was really getting good communication to all of our people leaders, all of our managers, so that we could actually get consistent expectations for them around what good looks like around communicating to their teams and how they would operate. So we strongly encouraged those regular catch-ups, especially when we were all on lockdown, remote catch-ups on Teams or Zoom, as it would be for others, and those check-ins on employees.

And then there was a number of other initiatives around supporting employee wellbeing, whether that’s mental wellbeing or physical wellbeing. So we ran programs, I guess, centrally, which was provided to employees. But we also tried to provide a lot of tools to our people leaders or our managers. So we’ve implemented some new connections with our people leaders or new proactive support for them. Connections with our people leaders or new proactive support for them, which will continue. We don’t see that stopping now. We were meeting twice a week during lockdown with all of our people leaders or our managers. We now have a regular monthly get together where they’re all coming along to those and it’s a very productive process. So that’s one of those really good learnings that’s come out of lockdown.

Hiroko Kowada (AOA):

Thank you, Pete. So, yes your show us the new flexible working style. I really would like to hear from you about how FMG developed your flexible working style one year later again.

Pete Frizzell:

Yes, it would be good to. It’s a fascinating journey we are all on I think isn’t it? So it would be good to see how that goes.

Hiroko Kowada (AOA):

So next speaker is Mr. Andrew Yeo on behalf of NTUC Income in Singapore. He will talk about how NTUC Income have pivoted their strategy and initiatives to ensure business community and how Income have supported their customers and community during this pandemic, etc. Andrew, please.

Andrew Yeo:

Hi, good morning or good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are around the world. Thanks for having me. Today what I’d like to share is how we have overcome or rather right through the pandemic, tsunami that came to us last year. And we are still going through it as we speak. So my showing today, I will mention a bit about how Singapore has coped with COVID-19. And how we navigated our business, protecting our people, customers, and community. And the plan going forward. So for Singapore, on the right you’ll see the daily chart of the infection numbers over the course of last year into even this year. And over there, you probably see roughly about two peaks, in which, the peaks were actually contributed by the Pharmaca Laboratories that we discovered the infection levels, and it really specced up exponentially during that period of time.

But I think so far that has been contained since the middle of last year. And since then, the number of infection rates have gone down quite tremendously. And all the cases that Singapore is seeing right now is much more the imported cases from people coming to Singapore. Local infection rates are actually zero. And probably even if there is, one or two occasionally. But since the onset of the pandemic, the government was very fast to close borders and impose safe management measures. And throughout that time has periodically distributed personal protective equipment, like mask, as well as contact tracing applications and tokens. The actual lockdown happened on April 7th, right through to June 1st. And like I mentioned since then, I think because of the infection rate, that has given the government some… Can loosen some of the safe management measures and we have gone from lockdown to phase two or phase three, as we label it in Singapore.

But throughout the time, the governments has also provided a lot of support schemes to help out the population in terms of job support schemes, property tax rebates, rent reliefs and foreign worker levies, solidarity payments. A total of four national budgets were announced close to hundred billion dollars, almost 20% of our GDP. Never before have we dug so deep into our budgets to provide for such a bill. And this year the continuous support amounting to about 11 billion in Singapore dollars for COVID reliefs, as well as 24 billion to help firms and workers much more selectively in sectors that are much more effected by the pandemic.

On the insurance sector, as a sector, we provided some programs or support for our customers as well. By and large, as a sector, we provided the premium payment deferment schemes, flexible installment payments schemes, both for retail, as well as for corporates. As we all know, the vaccination has been ongoing around the world. And in Singapore, the plan is to vaccinate the entire population by end of this year. And then from there, hopefully, we can begin our journey back to life as the normal as we used to know it.

So for Income, throughout that period of time, what have we been doing? So I think during the period of time, I think there are a lot of initiatives and support schemes like I just mentioned. And as we continue to journey on, we can see that the Singapore economy is beginning a so-called K-shape recovery by certain sectors. So like manufacturing, constructions, and services especially are seeing a renewed vigor in their business. After lockdown, I think there’s a pent-up demand to be out there. However, there are still sectors that are barely impacted like aviation and tourism, which is also form parts of the key pillars of the Singapore economy. And Singapore being a small domestic economy do depend on the global international trade to recover in order to get back to normal.

However, at the same point in time, we also know that through an investor polls check, that we know the investors wants a balance of growth and financial resilience. So from that survey, we also discovered that more 90% of investors want company to prioritize investments for top-line growth. And at the same point in time, feel that the financial resilience is important, but not at the expense of investing for growth. So during this period of time, we find that there are certain opportunities, while it is a challenging time… While it was a challenging time, sorry. But there were opportunities I think, available for nimble companies to tap on in order to still grow in the midst of the pandemic.

And now what did it mean for Income? So basically first what we really plan for the different scenarios that might come our way. And we implemented a task force that looked at future of work to ensure both the wellbeing of our people, as well as productivity for the organization. And really shifting the entire business operating model to balance growth and profitability. At the same point in time, we remained opportunistic in terms of opportunities for partnerships, as well as regional expansion. Because, I think that we never lose ways a crisis in terms of lessons learned. A lesson to be learned from the global financial crisis and again, this is away from BCG, that even in the midst of a crisis, there are still companies who are able to identify opportunities still are able to grow. So therefore in this chart, you can see that 14% of organizations during the GFC still grow in terms of profit margin, as well as sales. And what have they done?

Companies basically that have emerged stronger from crisis did four things. First is empowering their people through remote engagement and leveraging on technology to scale up some parts of their business. Leveraging a crisis as well, to shift towards much more digital models, as well as increasing their pace on omni-channel transformation. As well within the crisis I believe that, there are also different propositions that will actually be much more akin to the point in time for our customers. So companies were able to pivot their proposition to suit that period of time, I think would be able to latch onto the opportunities that the customer are looking for.

And of course, during crisis is always a good time to look at our financial resilience and looking at our cost structure, how we actually relocate costs to what’s a matter of value added functions. At the same point in time being an insurance company it’s also a good time and test of the ways risk frameworks that we have in place as an organization to test our solvency, our capital management. And at the same point, those that are wealthy, I think would be ready to take on opportunities that that might surface during a crisis. So those are the lessons that we picked up from the GFC that I think were quite relevant in this period of time.

This is a map of Income’s, fire strategy. I’m not going to go through in detail, just a snapshot for everybody’s information. I think what we have done during the crisis was really, we look at the fire strategy because at a point in time we just implemented this fire strategy. And we felt that this strategy still holds true, even though we were going through a pandemic. Because all these various ambition and strategies, were actually forward thinking, and it still holds true for us. Although during the pandemic, we need to reprioritize some of the initiatives, but by and large, the direction forward, it still holds true. And we continue to hold the course even through the pandemic.

First and foremost, I think the key was during the pandemic, how do we protect our people and our business? So there was immediate need to empower our staff as the lockdown happened, and everybody was supposed to work from home. And as Pete mentioned, I think one of the key challenges was when schools start closing and you have kids and parents all staying at home, they need to work and study from home. I think that was pretty chaotic in my own personal experience. However, as an organization, we really needed to speed up our enablement of enabling our staff to work from home. So I believe within the first two weeks of the lockdown, we were able to enable 95% of our staff with laptops that they can work from home. Introduced new digital tools like Microsoft Teams, so that they can actually do remote engagement. Equip our frontline staff with VoIP telephony, as well as virtual desktop infrastructure.

Because we do have staff that work across the border in Malaysia. So some of them because of the lockdown in both countries were unable to return back to work. So we enabled them with virtual desktop infrastructure. We had to upgrade our network to double the pipe size in order to handle the increase in bandwidth. We also shifted a lot of our staff training and development virtually. I think this is also lastly to capitalize on some of the time there was his freedom, because there are roles that were free during this period of time, especially those frontline staff. So we made use of those time to get our staff to attend virtual courses to upgrade themselves, re-skill them as well. And subsequently because of the pandemic, certain roles obsoleted. We begin the re-skilling program then, to re-skill them to a new role.

We also took the opportunity to redesign a lot of our processes. It’s amazing how a pandemic could change mindsets of people. That’s why I always tell them that the COVID-19 is probably the most effective global chief transformation officer without mentioning work and viral change. And we roll out the redesigned processes in record time, introducing ePayments, eSubmission, anything E, contracts, letters. Then usually to enable our staff to continue to be able to serve our customers. At the same point in time, we also understand that it is a time of high anxiety, and that’s why we also increased the level of communication with our people, providing them with the information as and when it happens, to keep them informed so as to make sure that… Give them the assurance that we don’t hold back any information.

Ultimately, I think during that period of time, I think this regular communications and very candid communications actually build trust during that period of time and helped to boost staff morale. And during that period of time, I’m sure that some of you would have experienced heightened level of cyber incidences. And that’s where we also needed to step up our cyber security in order to ensure that we maintain our vigilance for such attacks. At the same point in time, because of work from home, we also introduced telemedicine service as well as COVID-19 cover, not just for our staff, but also for our policy holders. And also that facilitates the ability to continue to receive such essential services remotely.

And for our intermediaries, what we did immediately and in lightening speed was also to establish the remote client engagement, which enables our intermediary to continue to engage with their customers remotely over videoconference. And the videoconference is not just about the servicing engagement, but the ability to fulfill the advisory as well as the purchase journey all fully online, while still fully complying to all the regulatory requirements. So during that period of time, like I mentioned, we introduced task force called, Future of Work, where we really pivoted from pre-COVID, during lockdown and post circuit breaker. What are the changes that we have made? So from technology and processes previously, from consulting tools, to telephony, to processes were all very traditional and paper-based and straight through wasn’t really that straight through. And during circuit breaker, we did introduce some digital tools in lightning speed.

However, we built on that opportunity to continue to do on those digital platforms that we establish or we put in place during circuit breaker, to move into cloud platforms and more self servicing, enabling, bringing on devices, accelerating digitalization at source for our customers to facilitate a high straight through processing. Our facilities pre-COVID was fixed desk, department clusters, meeting rooms, common areas for networking. And during lockdowns, it’s all home-based for obvious reasons. But during that period of time, we also pivoted to move away from the fixed desks and in clusters and rearranged all our buildings to hot-desking. In which anybody that wants to come to the office has to book for a desk, and there’s no designated place for a particular function. We repurposed all our meeting rooms to ensure that the safe measurements were put in place.

Video-first conference room, but as time progresses, we find that we probably have to go more to a hybrid model. And from a culture perspective, during pre-COVID was much now of, on-site corporate, functional trainings and such. During lockdown, we pivoted a lot into remote corporate training, tailor content, very personalized training content for our staff. And going to post-lockdown, and as we speak, we have enhanced some of our employee benefits to cater for new emerging needs. Like I mentioned, re-skill staff to move them into new roles as some roles were obsoleted as we will have all of us experienced during the pandemic. And because of the remote engagement, I think appraisals have just shifted much more towards more performance-based, outcome-based measures than especially service the traditional way of doing performance appraisal.

So at the same point and time we also know that we have to continue to engage our staff and try to be as business as usual as possible. So we continue to introduce engagement programs way remotely, recognizing our long service staff to continuing with our intermediary recognition programs. Even staff activity programs like eco run, despite the lockdown we did conduct eco run virtually just to make sure that we try to create the environment that is still as business as usual as possible.

At the same point in time, we also too found the opportunity to really pivot more and allocate more resources towards building digital capabilities. And it was during that period of time that we brought together different Scrum teams across the different business lines. So for this one is actually our corporate business platform where we took advantage of the lockdown to create a scrum to think through what we need in terms of a new customer journey for our corporate customers. I have to admit that during the period of time, it wasn’t easy to do scrums, but we journeyed through. It was challenging, but we journeyed through.

And despite that period in 2020, we emerged with a new system for our corporate business, where it is much more nimble architecturally. That is actually our front, middle and back system for our corporate business, where it enables our customers to be able to interact directly with us, our intermediaries as well, with us and with their customers, as well as digitizing the backend for our corporate business. And how this whole entire system is architected is with ambition to enable an SME or small medium enterprises ecosystem. So it’s not just about insurance, but the ability for other service providers to connect and provide services to our SME customers.

And for our retail business, we also continue and persevere through the pandemic period to continue to launch our new business model, namely SNACK, Tribe. And now we are embarking on Android. So these three new business models that we bought pre-COVID launched off during COVID period and still continuing developing, building the new platforms. I would say that in 2020, during the pandemic period, while it’s challenging to ideate or rather to come together to scrum and spring for such, but we persisted because we understood that in order to capitalize on the situation, digital engagement would be the key. And that’s why in middle of last year, we launched SNACK, which is a micro-insurance business model. And towards the end of last year, we launched Tribe, which is our subscription based insurance. And as we speak right now, we’ve embarked on the growth for Android, which is our omni-channel platform that will stitch together both our digital capability with digital ecosystem together with our traditional assisting business, especially our traditional channels that Income has.

And these are the three business models that I mentioned earlier. So we have, SNACK which is our micro-insurance business model that enables us to target and lower the barrier entry to insurance at 30 cents, 50 cents level. And Tribe, which is our subscription based insurance provides… It’s almost like Netflix of insurance where customers can actually select their own insurance needs and pay on a monthly basis, starting from 10, $20 a month. And then we move on to usage based insurance, which is for motor insurance, where you pay on usage. And lastly, this is in collaboration together with leasing companies where they’re able to put in a telematics, within the cost that they leased up, and we will be able to track by mileage. And customers pay motor insurance by mileage.

At the same point in time, how do we protect our customers? Because we understand that during that period of time, customers will also be anxious. And especially with a pandemic, there’s a heightened awareness of the need for insurance. So I mentioned earlier about the remote customer engagement digital tool that we provided to our intermediaries. But at the same point in time, we also continue to enable our call center to be able to work from home by providing them with virtual telephony, as well as virtual desktop, so that our frontline staff in the contact center, as well as the telesales team can continue to operate and service our customers. At the same point in time, we also scale up the information to our customers, especially for our branches, where there are closures. And even when the lockdown was released the floor to those branches are limited.

So all this have to be communicated to our customers in a timely basis so that they don’t show up and we can’t serve them. So for our branches, it’s not just about customers, even for staffing, we’re limited to a skeleton staff at those branches, and it’s only on appointment basis. All these are regulated by the government. So we set up virtual assistant stations in those branches, so that customers that comes in and can still continue to engage with our advisors if they want to do so. And for our processes, of course, we adjusted our operational processes to suit our customers during that period of time where we have a lot of exception claims handling, modified the processes for alternative customer outreach and as well as alternative underwriting requirements, because of the lack of… Not lack of, but the inability to do medical underwriting, or rather visit the doctors for underwriting purposes.

All those processes that we needed to adjust during that period of time for our customers. And at the same point in time like I mentioned earlier, the insurance sector did roll out a few support schemes… Rather, one support scheme in terms of deferment payment schemes. But for Income, we rolled out seven different support schemes for our customers, including the deferment payment schemes and other support for our low-income customers. More specifically, during that period of time, some of the schemes that we rolled out were more targeted at the gig economy, because at a point in time, I think the gig economy became the essential…

Because at a point in time, I think the gig economy became the essential service providers that we recognize that would continue to require coverage. And at the same point in time, a coverage that actually suits their income levels. So we actually rolled out seven different support schemes for different segments of our customers, both retail as well as corporate. We took the opportunity to also expand our income family micro insurance scheme, which provides covers for bread winners of low income families. So the original plan… Or rather our program should cover all primary school students. So bread winners of all primary school students from low income families. During that period of time, we extended that program to all secondary schools and we are in the midst of extending it to all high school students, bread winners of students of low income families.

During that period, like I mentioned, we also rolled out our digital products like Snack, Tribe and Carro, Rademacher usage based insurance. And, coincidentally, those digital products actually were very suitable for a particular underserved segment, which is the gig economy. Those distill business models actually suits the income profile of the gig economy workers. At the same point in time, we continue to provide coverage, not just for COVID-19, but we have extended those coverage to vaccination related to hospitalization in case there are complications arising out of the vaccination. So we have extended this cover this year, right to the end of this year.

I believe that we have fought well during 2020, times of uncertainty and every day was a new day, but throughout the period of time, I think we have stayed responsive and adaptive to the evolving situations. And at the same point have stayed in limbo to actually capitalize on opportunities to continue to grow our business even during the challenging time and happy to share that we ended 2020 very well, with sales revenues on target expenses as well. And, we took the opportunity also to reorganize some of the way that we do our budgeting, shifting some expense line to zero-based budgeting, to address the full stack of spending for some of the initiatives that we have. Ultimately at the end of the day, I think through that whole experience of 2020, we thought that we had virtually enabled and empower our people as far as our customer and community in the fight against this pandemic.

So plan going forward. Although the vaccination is on roll out, we are cautiously optimistic. We do plan out different scenarios, you can see on the right hand side, we have a baseline. The recovery will only happen in the second half of this year. What’s the stretch would be the recovery starts maybe next month, right? But that’s a bit farfetched. But we can be hopeful and the threshold will be that recovery only happens beginning of next year.

Three different scenarios to plan out on a business plan. So these are the different horizons that we have planned for our business plan. However, again, like I mentioned, we believe that our fire plan is the right strategy for the organization as it’s forward-looking, despite the pandemic and therefore we continue to march on towards our ambition. The strategy is still sound. We want to continue to do all the good work that has come out of 2020 to continue to further enhance our financial resilience and skill on the new business models that we’ve rolled out and continue as a cooperative to remain purposeful and empowered. But that’s all I have to share today. It’ll go back to you.

Hiroko Kowada (AOA):

Thank you, Andrew. The one Japanese question. So I will ask the interpreter to translate

Andrew Yeo:

So during the initial stage when the lockdown happened, I think that there’s definitely an impact on productivity because everybody was trying to get used to the new way of working as well as the time needed to roll out some of the equipment that the staff would need. Like I mentioned, Pete has also validated that the biggest impact was when school was closed. So the great reprieve was when school reopened. However, we continued to work from home. I think we have seen that productivity has come back up as our workforce get used to working from home. And I would say that at this point in time, I think most of the staff actually would have been very comfortable to work from home. Although recently, the government has announced that from 5th of April, some of the safety measures, safe managing measures will be further loosened. Up to 75% of workforce can go back to work and there’s no more split team arrangement required and stuff.

We virtually implemented a permanent hybrid booking model where staff with roles that can work from home, continue to work from home, but they are encouraged to come back to office, especially for meetings and engagement events. Because, I think while screen time provides the productivity and efficiency, it doesn’t replace Face time.

So I would say that productivity was initially impacted. And I think generally people understand even our customers, even though it was a time of anxiety, but I think as time passed by both our folks, as well as our customers I think they are getting used to the new norm. And I think productivity is actually tripped that up, back to normal.

The biggest challenge in getting it right…

Hiroko Kowada (AOA):

To digitize your back office process, what has been the biggest challenge?

Andrew Yeo:

I wouldn’t say that the biggest challenge gaining during that period of time, because I think the situation speaks for itself, which is why I mentioned earlier, that COVID-19 is probably the most effective global chief transformation officer. Because, the situation is clear for everyone to see. In effect because of that, some of the buy-in actually came from the employees themselves to understand that, processes need to be changed and that by changing standard processes, we’re actually helping each other work better. I would say that probably one of the challenge will be, as we face some roles being obsoleted, what will happen to the effaced staff? Which is why during that period of time we shifted, or rather for staff whose roles are affected by needing to be in office and can be in office, we actually pushed them to actually take on online courses, provided them go to a training in a bit of re-skill them.

In the process, we had probably re-skilled and re-deployed about 2000 staff to new roles. And we continue on a journey to actually to re re-skill and re-deploy some of our staff to new roles. So that probably will be the challenge we faced and providing that assurance to our people that, despite roles being obsoleted, there are new roles that we are working them into or rather current roles that we are rolling them into but, we also need their cooperation to actually go on training and will be back to be re-skilled and redeployed to new roles.

Hiroko Kowada (AOA):

Okay. Thank you, Andrew. So we are always learning from Income about innovation at any given time. Think I’m looks at the country as a poor and quickly catch what is needed for customers and community and looks ahead to this drastically. It’s a very leading company. Thank you very much.

So now I’d like to move on the Q&A session. So I will also refer to the questions from participants. And I will ask three speakers. There are some questions from participants. So I’d like to pick up the question from chats. So first question, was there any difficulties in negotiation with government or agency to get approvals about your latest initiatives?

Jackelyn Ballena:

Yes, in terms of the approvals and the government agency, I think because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government agency in charge of approvals for insurance products has been very relaxed as well. So during the start of the pandemic, they have released various circulars also to relax and to change as well, the processes. So it has not been difficult for us. Some of the products that we have launched also need not need additional approval because we just redesigned an existing product based on the current need. I hope that answers. Thank you.

Pete Frizzell:

I thought the question was specific. Because we haven’t been having too much change there. I was looking at as the next question, but I think you’re coming to that. Where most of the workers were replaced online, but the significance, effectiveness and value of direct human communication, I’ll talk to that if that’s okay.

From our perspective, we don’t think that personal interaction will ever go away. We are much a relationship based organization. We’re developing our online platform. We’re building that more and more. We always look at digital as an option for clients to choose to have. So we’d like to look to provide choice, convenience and control. So in effect, we still know that, especially farming and growing clients really value us coming to visit them on farm and have those quality conversations. So, we very much see digital as a complimentary channel, not as a replacement channel for our core client base.

Andrew Yeo:

In terms of getting the 11 authorities to approve the initiatives that we have. I have to say that I think in Singapore, the regulators have been very participative in helping the sector roll out the relevant initiatives that we have, especially those that looks towards protecting our people as well as our customers. For new initiative, admittedly during that initial period time, it did face a bit of delay, but that’s also understandable because they also all are busy grappling with the pandemic situation. However, I have to admit that, they have been very forthcoming and very participative in terms of looking at the various initiatives that were put in place to ensure that they are able to expedite those approvals as fast as they can. In view of this, the situation that we are all facing.

Hiroko Kowada (AOA):

Thank you Andrew. So the next question is, let me see, Japanese question. So I have to ask the interpreter to translate.

Andrew Yeo:

It was a journey. The initial rollout was a crude solution. Because, it just basically says what it needs. So the whole process probably took a month to roll out, but another, probably about three months to smoothen. So the initial uptake from the advisors was a bit patchy, I have to say because it involves learning a new skill in using the screen to actually interact with our customers. So I would say that the younger ones actually pick it up faster, but I would have to say that the more entrepreneurial ones took it on more faster, in terms of learning the skillset needed to operate the remote client engagement, digital tool platform. But those who had to catch on, were able to really see the value of how a digital tool when their business model of both screen time and face time.

After lockdown, the demand for advisory was actually pent up. And the advisors who actually took on the digital tools were able to compliment face time and screen time to actually maximize their productivity. For customers, it all depends on the advisor. Right. There is this trust element to actually journey the whole advisory process with the advisors. So for advisors who actually have a strong relationship with their customers, like I mentioned, the initial journey was a bit patchy, but it got better over time. So advisers with more trusted customers would journey the initial journey with them. But over time, as the process got smoother, I think even our customers are seeing the benefit of a combination of both screen time and face time. As we speak right now, I have to say that about close to about 90% of our intermediaries are actually on a remote client engagement platform. But, at this current moment in time, because of the ability to actually meet face-to-face. So it’s actually a combination of both face-to-face and remote engagement.

Hiroko Kowada (AOA):

Thank you Andrew. So next is a final question. This question is a for all the panelists. The Japanese question.

Pete Frizzell:

I think that was the question I answered before. I cheated by using Google translate. So I could see what the question was. So, as I said, that we see huge value in the human and direction going forward.

Andrew Yeo:

I would agree. I think there’s no replacement for the face-to-face. Ultimately it is still crucial. So I believe that going forward, what we have learned is that a hybrid model does work. Where, for certain engagements and certain events, we can use digital tools, but screen time can never replace the face time. Which is why, while we have implemented a permanent hybrid booking model, we do encourage our staff to come back to the office, especially for meetings, for work groups, for brainstorming and stuff. Those, I think what we learned last year, by doing those online, it is difficult. Although we have done it, but I think now that face time is allowed, those type of events will be most useful, true face time rather than screen time.

Jackelyn Ballena:

I definitely agree with Pete and Andrew that it’s very important. Human relations and having face to face is more valuable over screen time, but because of the needs for safety, I think it was inevitable for us to really engage with our customers and our employees through various platforms available. So, that’s all. Thank you.

Hiroko Kowada (AOA):

Thank you Pete, Andrew. Thank you for hearing this invaluable story today. So again, thank you very much.

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