Mike Ashurst:

Hello everyone and welcome to today’s ICMIF webinar: Future of insurance workforce. Thank you for joining us. Before we get started, just a quick reminder that if you have any questions about today’s presentation, you can send them via the GoTo Webinar platform and we’ll aim to get through as many of those as possible at the end of the presentation.

So, I’m delighted to be joined today by Duncan Meadows, Partner, Insurance at EY in Canada, and Duncan will share insights on how digital transformation is reshaping the insurance workforce, drawing on findings from the ICMIF EY future of insurance survey and EY’s latest research. He’ll highlight the role of AI and automation and what leaders can do to respond through workforce planning, upskilling, and enhancing the employee experience. Over to you, Duncan.

Duncan Meadows:

Fantastic. Thank you, Mike. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening from wherever you are in the world. So, as Mike said, I’m Duncan Meadows. I’m a partner here with EY based in Canada and I’ve had the pleasure of working with ICMIF for a number of years in a number of different roles, including focusing on the workforce agenda for insurance companies around the world.

So, today, as Mike said, we are here to talk about the future of insurance workforce. I will keep this vaguely interactive, so we have some polling questions throughout. So, keen to get your input. If you have questions, please do put them in the chat and at the end of the presentation, happy to take questions from anyone on the line. So, feel free to participate both via the polls and via questions as we go.

In terms of the agenda for today, just want to cover four key topics. One is just a very, very brief outlook on the insurance industry, setting the scene for what it means from a workforce perspective. Secondly, I’ll share some research in terms of what we’re seeing from a future of insurance roles and skills perspective based on input from ICMIF members. So, particularly, we polled HR leaders around the globe to get input from what they were seeing. So, I’ll share some of those findings.

Then I’ll share a bit of an EY point of view in terms of what we’re seeing from a roles and skills perspective across the insurance industry. And then finally the “so what”. So, what can we do from a talent strategy perspective to help address some of these changing nature of workforce roles and skills? So, that’s the run order for today.

So, relatively briefly, we’ll start then on that big picture, so what’s happening in the insurance industry overall and the insurance outlook? So, a few things to mention here, three big themes. Firstly, we’re really seeing increased volatility and increased complex landscape around the world and I’m sure that’s no surprise to anyone. The economic outlooks and growth agendas are really quite different today to maybe six or 12 months ago. See increased impacts of trade and tariffs, et cetera, particularly impacting many places around the world. We’re also seeing evolving societal needs.

And so, with some of that instability and volatility and demographic shifts, we are seeing different patterns and opportunities potentially sparking demand both personally and commercially within that complex landscape. And then we are seeing definitely lots of changes from a regulatory perspective, particularly regulation related to technology coming in play, as well as we’re seeing lots of M&A around the world in the insurance space. And so, a combination of regulatory factors changing that landscape. So, we are seeing a very complex and increased volatile world picture affecting the insurance industry.

From a growth perspective, we’re seeing lots of different paths to growth in the insurance industry. So, again, quite a different picture. For those in the P&C space, we are seeing that, in fact, although there’s many headwinds, we are actually seeing that return on equity in the last five years across the industry. I don’t know if this is the mutual audience, but we’re seeing that profitability or return on earnings is broadly at relatively high levels historically.

So, although there are some headwinds, we are seeing a relatively strong picture across the P&C industry, but with some headwinds as I mentioned. So, reinsurance, for those in the reinsurance space, we’ve seen reinsurance grow 50% globally in the last 10 years. So, an increased reinsurance picture with certainly increased prices linked to that volatility. From a life perspective, definitely seeing, again, some, I’d say, more stability versus P&C in terms of that growth picture.

So, within the growth landscape, what are those paths to growth? Well, we are seeing certainly more innovation and tech-led distribution with more ecosystem partnerships and cross-selling happening across a number of lines of business. In the commercial line space, looking at processing parametric solutions coming into play, alternative risk transfer and increased public-private partnerships around the commercial space.

We’re seeing things. Like in the personal line space, we’re seeing bundling usage-based insurance and embedded insurance really coming to the fore. And then in life, we’re seeing more flexible products coming into play and further distribution expansion. So, quite a varied picture I’d say across the growth agenda.

And then finally, from a retooling the enterprise, like data, technology and talent, obviously, the hottest topic in town, certainly AI and working out how do we leverage the data we’ve got or improve our data quality to be able to leverage AI to automate and digitise operations, increase agility and help improve customer outcomes. And then from a talent perspective, how do we have the right talent in place to take ownership, to take advantage of changes to these first two buckets, as well as then the data, technology piece around leveraging AI and digitalization with a culture of innovation.

So, overall, what does this mean then in terms of evolving roles, skills and talent for the insurance workforce of the future? This is the topic for today. But firstly, guys, I’d love your input. And through this presentation, we’ll use a few Slidos. So, for those not familiar, it’s similar to Menti. So, if you have a few seconds now, would love to go to on the slido.com and use the code on the screen there or you can scan the QR code and just get your perspective in terms of, from your organisation, wherever you are in the world, what’s your highest priority focus right now in terms of, are you really focusing on navigating complexity on profitable growth or on laying the tech foundations?

Well, I’ve given you a bit of a cop-out answer at the bottom, doing all of the above. We’d love to have your responses quickly to where you’re focusing and then help tailor the talk track today around your focus.

Great choice. I see 10 responses already, so that’s really great. Let’s see if we can get a few more.

We’re up to 19. Okay, let me reveal the results and we’ll see where folks are. So, maybe unsurprisingly, all of the above, as I thought, maybe the answer is the most popular choice here. Frankly, insurance companies need to be able to navigate that complexity and volatility in the market. Lucky to be having some pressure on growth as well as having the right foundations in place. So, lots of good folks across all of those areas. Thank you for your answers there. We’ll come back to that shortly.

So, if I just can share here now, again. We did a survey of the HR leaders around the ICMIF group of member organisations on their views on the insurance workforce of the future. And so, I’ll share some of these results now. First, we looked, looking back and looking forward, how have organisations seen changes over the last two years to roles, skills, and team sizes. And then looking forward for the upcoming three years, what’s the potential outlook for changes to roles, skill sets and team sizes.

And maybe unsurprisingly, again, here, the most common answer was that moderate changes have been experienced to date and that moderate changes are expected to be experienced over the next three years to a combination of roles, skills, and team sizes within the ICMIF and the group of companies. So, we do expect to see some moderate to high level of change over the coming few years in terms of the workforce.

Drilling down a little deeper, we took a look by function and there’s two axes to this graph that’s the level of change within different key verticals or key functions within the group. And then we ask, what’s the expected impact of AI on those groups? So, again, across the board, we’ve seen pretty high levels of change expected, particularly customer service, IT and data management seeing the highest level of impact we expect within the ICMIF group in terms of those changes. But actually, across the board, we’re seeing pretty high impact.

Interestingly, distribution is the area that’s been surveyed to see the least impact, both in terms of changes to roles and skills as well as the expected impact of AI on that function. Across the board, we are seeing relatively high levels of impact expected.

We then asked, what do you expect to see in terms of the increase or decrease in volume of work for those functions over the coming three years? And again, across the board, we did see relatively high levels of increase expected. So, 35% expected increase was the minimum expected across the board across all functions, with IT and data management and claims and customer service expected to see the most increase in workload and distribution expected to see the largest decrease.

And I’ve put a little exclamation mark there because, frankly, this is an area where I think we can talk further and I’ll share EY’s point of view shortly, but I think this is one where I’m giving a bit of a health warning. Maybe my point of view here is a little different to what we saw on the survey, but sharing the results and we’ll come into EY’s point of view shortly.

We then asked, what are the top drivers of workforce changes? And we gave a whole range of different answers there. And AI and emerging tech was certainly loud and clear number one in terms of that list of drivers with broader process and operational efficiency being number two, and then the focus of the organisation being number three. And then we saw that in terms of, so what about that then, we saw that 81% of the company survey believed the org design and strategic workforce planning were a moderate to high focus for the organisation over the coming years. So, 81% believe that OD and SWP will play a key role in helping the organisation navigate the future.

From a skills’ perspective, so 71% of respondents said upskilling has seen a moderate to significant increase in the organisation in recent times, and that aligns very closely, in fact, to some World Economic Forum research that I’ll share shortly. And so, we’re seeing learning programmes being focused on. We’re seeing new talent and on-the-job training as being the top three approaches used to developing new skills. And again, we’re seeing bite-sized learning and online learning platforms being used, as well as some good old-fashioned in-house training or face-to-face as being used to drive more adaptive learning.

And I have seen a bit of a rebound back towards, just anecdotally here, in-house training, speaking to members and insurance companies around the world in terms of a bit of a rebound towards in-house training and in-person training, as well as certainly bite-sized learning. And online, obviously, continues to be a main source of learning. I think, obviously, AI is certainly rapidly going to transform the way that e-learning can be delivered, but we are seeing some increased focus back to in-house and in-person training.

In terms of skills, and again, this really does echo the World Economic Forum research quite closely as well, what we’re seeing, there’s a focus on data analysis skills, digital literacy and adaptability being the top three skills being focused on within ICMIF member organisations. And barriers, again, a whole variety of barriers to why learning may be challenging, but time, budget and employee buy-in are three largest. But they’re pretty equal balanced across those things as well as the ability of L&D teams to deliver the learning required.

In terms of employee value proposition, so again, maybe unsurprisingly, as a mutual group, I’d say there’s very strong confidence in the employee value proposition within the ICMIF group and that certainly echoes anecdotal research and other research we’ve done, which shows that there’s certainly higher ability to attract, retain, and motivate staff at mutuals versus stock carrying insurance companies. So, EVP remains a key differentiator for mutuals around the world.

But that said, there still are challenges in replacing critical skills, and 41% found it difficult to replace critical skills, 53% neutral and only 6% found it easy to find the skills they require. Again, that was pretty consistent with external research as well. While mutual EVP is strong, there are still challenges in terms of recruiting the right skills.

The final slide I’ll share from this bit of ICMIF research we did together was around talent attraction and retention. So, only 24% of ICMIF member companies who responded feel that they are very effective in attracting and retaining top talent. It’s a bit of a mixed picture, but mostly, effective to neutral was really where the majority felt they were at.

In terms of strategies being used, flexibility and employee well-being were two at the top of the list, as well as some of the learning opportunities we can provide and the workplace culture. That’s a whistle-stop tour of some research we did together with ICMIF, EY and ICMIF, on outlook on the insurance workforce. And I’d love to, again, get your input from a Slido perspective before I go on to EY point of view.

So, from you guys, would love to hear to what extent do you believe, over the next five years, roles, skills and team sizes in your organisation will change? So, from your perspective, do you think there’ll be a very large change to roles, skills and team sizes, a large change, a moderate change, a minor change, or a very limited change? We’d love to see how you think there’ll be a five-year timeframe change.

I’ll wait for 20 responses and then I’ll share the results.

Okay, interesting. So, a moderate change, a medium change is the main answer responded, followed by a very large change and a large change. And one person, two people were saying minor, not at all, and that’s quite interesting. So, it’s a medium extent being the key answer. I think we definitely hear there’s some different points of view, certainly from many folks I’ve spoken to in terms of the rate of change we expect to see and possibly linked to the ambitions around use of technology in organisations and what it means. Thank you for your answers.

So, now, I’ll move on to sharing some World Economic Forum and then some EY views on future of roles and skills impacts within insurance. And I’ll start with World Economic Forum. So, a few key stats here, so 63% of employers surveyed by the World Economic Forum in the report just published this year because the skills gaps were the biggest barrier to business transformation. So, skills gaps still being absolutely key to address and that 73% of employers aiming to prioritise workforce upskilling by 2030.

And interestingly, if you drill into the numbers, insurance have had the biggest increase by far of any sector globally in the learning focus over the last two years. So, 23% of insurance companies have seen a very material increase in learning offered over the last couple of years, so significant focus. And as you can see from the skills in 2025 to the skills in 2030, big, big change in terms of, jumping to the top of the list are technology related skills being much more in demand in five years’ time than they are today in terms of that priority of core skills globally.

So, why is this the case with insurance specifically? Well, if you look at this graph here, this plot’s augmentation and automation of process and tasks within industries, so augmentation being the combination of robot, AI and human collaboration of tasks and the automation of tasks. And insurance is middle of the pack in terms of augmentation, but it’s way out ahead in terms of automation of processes and tasks. So, we think insurance will be or could be significantly disrupted over the coming years in terms of use of AI and automation on a global level.

And within the industry specifically, whilst this will be the case, we believe that 43% of employers predict that talent availability actually is going to worsen, and there’s a strong need to upskill and reskill to meet the future workforce needs around the world. So, yes, there’ll be automation and augmentation. Also, there’ll still be a talent shortage in key roles and we’ll need to materially upskill our organisations to be ready to work in the future world.

So, 91% of employers plan to upskill their workforce and adapt to this changing context and 82% believe that talent development will need to improve over the next five years to get us there. So, again, there’s a need to change and there’s a strong need to change how we can change our focus and how we can upskill. Again, this is World Economic Forum research and there’s links to the main report which is extensive on these slides that you’ll get along the session.

So, moving on to EY’s point of view then. So, we look at what are some of the major role types within the insurance industry. So, we looked at sales and service, we looked at underwriting, looked at claims, finance and actuarial, data and analytics, and we asked five key questions. So, what will the key trends be in these business areas? How will roles and skills be impacted? What do we think they’ll mean from an increase or decrease in organisational sizing? What might some future roles look like, and what do we think the impact of technology will be on these functions?

So, we asked those five questions for these five key business areas, and I’ll take you through some of this thinking now. So, within sales and service, we think from a personal lines’ perspective, we’ll see continued increase in commercialisation and digitalization in personal lines. In some markets, again, it’s a very differing world picture here in terms of level of intermediation, but there’s certainly going to be a battle of customer ownership and customer access, whether that’s through intermediate channels and/or through digital channels.

So, that customer contact being super important to sell, continue to sell and serve, and there may well be new entrants joining the market, including embedded insurance, so more point of sale selling insurance products. So, again, for mutual carriers, making sure we have continued access will be key.

So, roles and skills-wise, we think there’ll be a trend towards a chief experience officer and functions aligned to having this holistic view of customer experience across sales, marketing and digital and having this ability to understand and help customers navigate between different channels across their experience journey and really upskilling in customer-centric human skills supported by data. So, making sure we have the right data access from both sales and service types of roles, making sure that people have tools that help them understand what we think that means, and then augment that human centric skill set with data.

From an org sizing perspective, and again, this does vary a bit by market, we think there will be a continued war on talent for front office. So, those in the broking or advisor or agent space or even digital selling, also phone-based selling, there still will be, I think, a continued war on talent for that top skill of being able to generate sales.

For more service and contact centre-oriented roles, we expect there’s likely to be reductions over time and obviously, increasing in digital self-service and AI will likely reduce some of that work. So, more talent on the sales side, likely reductions on the service side. And again, there’ll be a borrow, buy, build. How do we best meet those needs? Is it all in-house, hire at lower end and train up? How do we best get those skills in place for sales and service will be an ongoing point of debate, as well as how do we then engage our broker partners for those who sell through brokers?

From a well perspective, again, we’re thinking there’ll be more an omnichannel distribution specialist roles to design and execute against that cross-channel sales and service type way of working. Again, from a tech perspective, we’ve much more augmented work and technologies to predict and forecast where human effort is required to best meet customer needs in the sales and service journeys.

From an underwriting perspective, we think there’ll be more tools coming into place. Certainly, there’s been a lot of focus on policy admin systems and we’re seeing more folks underwriting work benches, being able to pull together information from a variety of sources into a single place for underwriters to do their job and reducing the effort around simple tasks for underwriters and underwriting assistants.

And we’re seeing a big trend towards more portfolio analysis. So, how do we focus on the overall book of business from an underwriter versus writing an individual risk? So, making sure the overall book and shape of the book is profitable rather than just individual risk writing. From a roles and skills impact, again, we expect to see automation around manual tasks and reduction of manual task effort, but much more use or utilisation of data in the underwriting process and leverage technology to structure data and use it in the underwriting process as well as product management.

From an overall sizing perspective, we expect those support roles to reduce, again, as AI handles lower value work. We think that we brought stability in the core underwriting space for more commercial and complex risks. I think there’ll be, certainly for those who are in the more personal line space, the embedded insurance being a key focus for those who are in that market. And so, how do we best leverage embedded products to go to market in the future via non-traditional insurance sales routes today with many tech trends around AI data and work benches in place?

From a claims point of view, we’re seeing a bit of a polarisation in terms of skills. So, there’s obviously a need for customer-centric frontline skills at a point of loss thereafter to make sure the claims experience is a really positive one. And we’re seeing a need for increase of stable for technical back office skills who really know product policy and claims and really help do that technical assessment on claims with maybe more of a human hybrid middle office experience in between those two things.

Certainly, we’ll need some workforce planning focus where we make sure we smooth those peaks, certainly in some lines of business where we see high levels of peaks of loss and that pressure on claims teams at certain times of year. We are seeing an evolution of AI and automation in this space, but we’re not seeing a revolution in terms of roles. We think it’s more of an evolution rather than revolution in claims and loss prevention across both claims and underwriting being an increasing focus. So, how can we proactively and reactively manage and monitor the loss?

We think from a sizing perspective, we expect to see if we are successful with growing policy volumes and maintaining policy volumes and claims volumes potentially as well, we expect to see maybe potential growth in the claims area but not growth in headcount and maybe a stable to decreasing team size based on this with potentially focus on loss prevention again.

Back to this polarisation of skills, we are seeing, in fact, some organisations looking at more of a concierge service. So, who’s that point of contact, human and/or human-digital augmented point of contact across the claims journey? So, that front office customer-centric skill set in claims aren’t necessarily highly, highly technical but have claim skills play that concierge and experience role on top and across that claims journey.

And tech trends, certainly, we’re seeing tonnes of tech trends around indemnity control, analysis there and third-party management being key focus areas in the tech space in particular. From a finance and actuarial perspective, again, certainly, for those who’ve been impacted by IFRS 17, the ongoing focus around data processes and systems certainly is a key trend in the finance space as well as actuarial and we obviously need to improve our ability to leverage data throughout those finance and actuarial processes.

We do wonder whether there’s going to be a finance operations teams may drive operational improvements in those areas, but with an important role around data management and large volumes of data in the finance and actuarial space and potentially more managed services arrangements around finance and actuarial provision.

Now, for sizing-wise, we’ve seen many organisations have increased effort and resource in these areas post-IFRS 17 or around IFRS 17 and we think that improved processes could see reductions maybe back to previous levels, but we haven’t seen evidence of that really yet to date. So, most folks still have the same or really higher work volumes and roles and costs in this area right now.

And from a future role perspective, we’ve thought about this financial results steward, who really understands the end-to-end process and the end-to-end results across finance, actuarial, technology and data. So, do want to have these four different skill sets in complex areas to really understand our results. And that’s certainly being a focus of potential future roles. And again, how can we leverage technology to free up time to provide higher value services, higher value effort in finance and actuarial, doing more analysis and insight versus data manipulation and number crunching.

And then finally, data and analytics. So, how do we enable humans to leverage AI across the organisation? And so, how do we have teams in place who are the thought leaders here to provide the ability for the organisations to leverage AI enabled by better data? So, how do we have the right frameworks in place, systems, processes to be able to leverage that technology? So, again, there’s obviously more technical roles and skills around data and analytics as well as that enabling the workforce role that requires that business partnership from data analytics teams to really help leverage future AI products.

Thinking role-wise sizing, thinking that actually a number of roles will be relatively stable, potentially some increases here. So, it’s probably a broadly stable picture from a roles and skills’ perspective. And certainly, we’ll need to have strong processes in place from ethics and controls perspective around AI. So, while we want to try and help our businesses transform, we’ll certainly need to have the work controls in place.

So, that’s a whiz through and there’s a lot of information there how we’re seeing five key roles or business areas potentially change over the next few years across the picture. I’ve got a summary slide here, but first, I’d love to get your input on these areas. And so, would love to ask you, out of those five areas we’ve just talked about, which types of roles do you believe will have the most change over the coming five years? And I’ve given no catch-all answer here in terms of all of them. Would love to get your perspective from where you see in your organisation the biggest change coming.

Okay, thank you. Up to 17 answers. Thanks for being so speedy, guys. 19. Okay, interesting. So, loud and clear answer here from this group that data and analytics is the biggest focus in terms of role changes over the next five years for your organisations with some application then across core insurance functions of underwriting, sales and service and claims. Very interesting.

So, for those who are able to follow the thread of my thinking over the last few slides, we’ll then wrap this up into a what does this mean from an overall picture perspective? So, on the vertical axis, we’ve got that role volume outlook based on our thinking. And on the horizontal axis, we’ve got level of skills changes we think are required. And so, again, at the top of this, we think loss prevention or some may use the words “risk engineering” will have a moderate skills change and an increased focus. Not saying it’s necessarily going to be the primary focus of the organisation, but we think there’ll be an increased focus on loss prevention with a moderate skill change.

So, how can we get ahead of predicting and managing loss and mitigating loss when it occurs? So, that being an increased role of the insurance company, moving beyond just predicting and then paying out when losses occur, but how can we help our members, our end customers reduce loss overall? And again, here, we’re seeing that moderate to high change in skill as well as potential increase in focus and volume around data and AI.

So, I think we agree with you and your answers just now that data and AI will be potentially the highest focus for the organisations over the coming few years. So, I think we agree in terms of your answers you’ve just given us here. So, again, how do we redefine these roles? How do we attract, how do we develop the right talent we need in these areas to be successful in the future?

In this middle bucket, I’d say there’s probably more variety in terms of by geography and by line of business. And so, some folks may just disagree with this based on their geography or line of business. But overall, we’re seeing, I think, broad stability in terms of frontline sales jobs in terms of the total volume.

Some markets and certainly personal lines in some areas have been radically transformed already and there’ll be some more of that trend in sales. But overall, we think there’ll be a broad, stable volume of sales roles, maybe with a slight decrease but with a moderate change. So, we can use an augmentation of data to help frontline sales staff and predict customer needs to help cross-sell, to help understand their journeys as well.

Again, those primary underwriting roles, particularly in the commercial space and group space, we think, will again moderate change use of data, use of workbench, use of AI, but they’re relatively constant volume of work with a similar story around actuarial. So, again, how do we retain and evolve our talent in these spaces, I think, is the key thing. We want to make sure we have the right talent in place and we want to keep them and retain them where we know certainly for sales roles, for actuarial roles and for underwriting roles, we know there is a war on talent out there and those skills are in high demand even if we think there’ll be a relatively constant state of number of roles in the industry.

In the bottom box here in the middle, we’ve got moderate level of change. We think finance will have some level of change in terms of, again, if you use Copilot, we’ve got tonnes of examples we can leverage. Even just looking at Copilot plugins today, lots of finance work can be improved or sped up using AI as of today, let alone in a few years’ time.

And then underwriting support roles as well as, frankly, claim support roles really where there’s that relatively, comparatively lower skill, higher manual type of effort, that work will likely be automated over time. So, we’re likely to see a decrease in those types of roles, which may pose a challenge around how do we get more entry level folks into the industry around core competencies around underwriting and claims.

Then the bottom right box where we see a tonne of disruption, we see certainly major disruption to the service and claims functions. Again, use of data and AI will really change those. I think, over time, there’ll be a decrease in the total number of roles in those areas. Again, a mixed picture. Certainly, claims technical roles will be much more of a stable picture, we think, for the next few years. But service and more operational claims roles, we think there’ll be a decrease. There’s some pretty large changes driven by technology over those years. So, again, how do we manage those career journeys? How do we upskill folks in this kind of categories?

And again, observation here, this is my hypothesis. EY’s hypothesis is there’ll be almost no roles that have a low level of skills change over the next five years. So, that’s that prediction that every role in insurance organisations will see at least a moderate level of disruption over the next five years. That’s a useful talk through how we’re seeing roles and skills.

If I move on then to talent strategies, so what can you do about this? Well, firstly, the nature of work is changing and yet, we don’t know how to adapt. Most folks don’t know how to adapt as quickly as we need to meet that changing technology. So, again, we certainly encourage folks at a company level and an individual level to really embrace AI.

I was at a lunch last week with one of the CEOs of one of Canada’s biggest insurance companies and he was saying AI is like electricity. That really if you don’t embrace it, you’ll be the last ones having lunch by candle lights before too long. So, it’s fundamental. We think of the world technology in the future, so really need to embrace it, but still, by 2030, there’ll still be a large shortage of talent. So, while there may be some roles decreasing over time, having people with the right skills, the right talent in place will still be a challenge.

We know the workforce are changing expectations. Obviously, we’ve got a whole tonne of different generations in the workforce right now with very different needs and expectations of ours and only 32% of employers do we believe have what we define as a talent advantage. And I’ll go onto what that means in a bit more detail on the next slide. And again, businesses today and in the future have needs and have new needs. So, we do have an urgent need for talent in many businesses and how do we drive to get that talent in place, whether that’s, again, acquiring new talent or upskilling people in the organisations today to unlock that business value.

In terms of talent advantage, we did a survey of a tonne of business leaders around the world. It was a thousand or so business leaders and we looked at a whole number of different questions and dimensions. We looked at overall company performance, then we looked at how they scored on talent dimensions. And these key five talent dimensions are what we looked at and we saw an extremely strong correlation between companies who performed well overall from a business perspective and companies who scored well in these five areas.

And conversely, we saw a very strong correlation between those who scored poorly on overall business outcomes and at these five areas. So, again, it shows that companies who score well on culture and workplace, on talent, health and flow on working with the technology and GenAI, on total rewards and on learning and upskilling performed well as organisations.

So, a few things to call out on here. So, we see this convergence of workforce and workplace, so how do we embrace modern ways of working? Many organisations still in hybrid, insurance is typically behind other sectors and behind banking in terms of more face-to-face working, but how do we maximise that human connection between workforce and workplace and keep flexibility that we know many folks still really value?

We know there’s going to be increased flow of talent. We know that younger generations are more likely to be willing to move. So, we think there’s going to be an increased level of attrition or talent flow over time than historical levels, current economic climate notwithstanding. So, we think the medium-term trend will be an increased level of talent flow, people leaving roles. And so, those organisations who embrace that and try and create internal talent mobility and processes to plan for and move talent will likely do better than those who don’t and then may lose more talent to external market.

I mentioned AI and electricity. Again, we encourage the companies who will embrace use of AI will likely do better in the medium term. From a rewards’ perspective, we know certainly that personalization, focusing on life stages, potentially more variable comp as well as, just frankly, thinking about cost of living and overall total comp as well being key to satisfaction. And then finally, maybe even most importantly, again, how do we make sure we have the learning paths, career paths in place to help foster the talent we need to help our people evolve the skills required in the future. So, these five things, what we call the talent advantage, and again, a strong correlation between companies who score highly here and those who do well overall as a business.

With that, I’d like to invite you to participate in one final Slido poll. So, from your perspective today, where do you think your organisation needs to focus most to drive talent advantage for you? What’s your highest priority out of those five areas for your organisation?

Thank you, guys. I see 17 responses. 18. Let me show results. Very interesting. Again, maybe I led the witness here, maybe we just naturally align. But again, that learning skills and career pathways, really for the mutual space being critical pace of change of roles and skills. And if you agree, that’s going to be high. How do we get our folks to be able to upskill in a timely way given the pace of change of technology?

So, again, my personal theory is that some of this will help solve itself in terms of the ability to curate and leverage and roll out. Upskilling around technology will actually help. AI itself will help us be able to do that much more quickly in future than we’ve done historically, but we need the skills, the teams internally, the partnerships potentially to do that. So, we need to make sure we are set up in a way, both from the L&D HR teams as well as from business teams, to really understand what we need in much more real time and get learning to our people to help them get the skills they need.

Maybe unsurprisingly here, from a culture and workplace perspective, zero scores in terms of that being the highest priority potentially given the high-quality culture we see in many mutuals and strong employee value proposition and satisfaction of staff. So, really, it’s a question of how do we give our people the skills they need? It’s likely the priority. Thank you for participation there, guys.

So, finally, wrapping up here on my last content slide, so we’re thinking focus on that talent advantage. Looking across those five lenses and working out where’s the right focus for you as an organisation will be really important, both within the HR function as well as business teams. We do really believe that roles and skills will evolve and often have this debate around do you plan for roles, you plan for skills? My personal view is you need to plan for both. So, what are the roles we’re going to need in the future and what are the skills we’re going to need? And so, looking at both roles and skills and making sure we’ve got frameworks to think about both of those things.

For those who are change fatigued, I’m sorry to say that I think the pace of change will only increase rather than decrease. And the change being ever present in our industry and certainly the outlook there and you saw on the World Economic Forum slide, the predictions that really insurance will be one of the most disrupted industries by technology over the next five years will mean that we all have to be resilient, change champions and embracing the transformation as a capability.

And then finally, and again maybe for a mutual audience, this is potentially one that’s already pretty well-served, but we need to make sure that we do think about different life stages, different personal experiences, think about the needs of our workforce across multiple generations with the right flexibility in career, rewards and wellbeing for our workforce. So, those are some of the key things to think about as you take this away into your day-to-day role and future planning.

With that, I’ll just steer you towards a couple of items. So, we have our mutual market scan. We did EY in partnership with ICMIF at the end of last year. That’s online and I’ll say that’s a good read, helps to contextualise some of this thinking, as well as we’ve done a global outlook that also helps and paints the picture including on the talent agenda as well. So, those are two other pieces of reading you may want to do in your spare time.

And then finally, in terms of before I hand over to questions, Mike, just obviously feel free to reach out to me personally. I’m in Canada but with a pretty global outlook and work with ICMIF regularly. So, happy to take questions of follow up offline as well. With that, Mike, we’ll open the floor to questions if you have any.

Mike Ashurst:

Great. Thank you, Duncan, and thank you for those extremely useful insights. We do have a few questions, so we’ll dive right into some of those now. So, where do you see the biggest skills gaps in the insurance workforce today?

Duncan Meadows:

So, if you look at pure turnover levels globally and where we’re seeing politically high churn or high recruitment effort, interestingly enough, it’s the sales function that actually has the highest level of churn and the need to attract volumes of staff in that sales function. So, maybe a surprising answer. That’s the quantitative answer in terms of total volume.

I think in terms of, and certainly in the mutual space, I think, again, the ability to leverage getting data into a shape that we need and be able to use it and then using AI tools, I actually think the data is probably the bigger challenge, frankly, right now. Getting our systems and data set up in a way we can then use it. I think we are seeing a need for focus there. So, I’d say qualitatively getting data in a state to be ready for AI use.

I think we are seeing much more, and not to negate the quality work of mutuals, but we are seeing much more experimentation in the stock carrying space and capital placed there around use of AI. And so, I think having as a mutual audience, making sure we don’t get left behind and we do place our bets or enough of our bets in experimentation there on data and AI as being the other answer as well.

Mike Ashurst:

Great, thank you. Another one, how can smaller insurers start preparing for the workforce transformation with limited resources?

Duncan Meadows:

That’s a really great point and maybe I’ll plug ICMIF here. I think ICMIF do a great job in terms of connecting mutuals globally in terms of being able to leverage and learn from each other. And certainly, we obviously might lead a great HR Forum that I’m part of, which helps to share some of those insights. I think it is tough.

I think, obviously, a few thoughts. Obviously, different workforce hiring strategies can potentially help in terms of if you’re willing to hire folks in different geographies, different locations that can help in terms of talent attraction. That said, it can also be a downside in terms of the risk of folks being poached by companies elsewhere. It’s also a potential risk. I think, again, for me in terms of some of these big trends, starting small and just getting familiar and used to using technology will be important in terms of how’s it going to impact, again, the core claims, underwriting service roles.

I think starting small, experimenting, not necessarily having to have a huge business case or promise, but using technology in smaller doses to start to experiment and just naturally upskill in how we work. I mean I’m personally no technology evangelist, but I use AI every day, multiple times a day now, and a year ago, I used none. So, I’ve personally been on quite a journey myself in the last 12 months. So, I’d encourage you if you’re not to work with your data and your compliance teams to think through that. Those are probably two of my answers there.

Mike Ashurst:

Great, thanks. One final one, which emerging roles should mutuals prioritise as the industry evolves?

Duncan Meadows:

Which priority roles? Again, there’s probably a personal answer depending on the company and where they’re at. So much as a one-size-fits-all answer, it’ll depend on your strategy. Again, for me, in my view, having an experience officer, who can look at that end-to-end customer journey across different channels or across face-to-face, phone and digital will be super important. So, how do we have that view of customer experience? For me, that will be a key trend.

I think, again, data and AI focus, having a custodian of that will be super important. And then I think the rest of that will depend from there on business strategy, line of business and business setup in terms of what priorities are from there. But experience, data and AI being the two I’d focus on.

And then depending on your organisation, whether your priority is sales and service, whether you’ve got a gap there, whether you’ve got high demand in claims or underwriting, again, for me, strategic workforce planning is a key tool to look at your organisation, look at the roles and skills you think you’ve got today, what you’ll need in the future, including potentially some demographic information in terms of where our pain point is going to be in the future as well, I think, are super important.

Looking at, for example, in claims or underwriting, do we have ageing, highly tenured, highly experienced technical staff we need to try and replace? If so, how do we focus there? So, I think there’s a macro point around experience and then data and AI use and a micro point around functional trends and needs as well.

Mike Ashurst:

Great. Thank you, Duncan. I think we’ll leave it there. So, thanks again for taking the time to present to us today and for answering those questions. As usual, a recording of this webinar will be available on the ICMIF Knowledge Hub, along with all of our webinars and strategic intelligence assets. The recordings and transcriptions of all past ICMIF webinars are available on the webpage shown here, which are exclusively for ICMIF members.

Thanks, Duncan, for the plug for the ICMIF HR Forum. This meets every couple of months and it’s an opportunity for HR professionals from ICMIF members to get together to discuss topics like the one we had today, as well as other HR related topics. So, please do get in touch if you’d like to learn more about this. And a final thank you to Duncan for an excellent presentation and thanks to all of you for joining us. We hope to see you again at another ICMIF webinar. Thank you and have a great day.

Duncan Meadows:

Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

Mike Ashurst:

Thanks.