Ben Telfer:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first ICMIF Young Leaders webinar on Driving Innovation to Transform your Business. I’m delighted to say that we have over a 100 people registered for this webinar. I’m pleased to hand over today’s moderator, Ellie Anderson from Thrivent Financial.
Ellie Anderson:
Thank you all for joining us. I’m extending a warm hello from Minnesota. Many of you I had the opportunity to meet in London and now we have the joy of growing our network of young leaders at mutuals and cooperatives further thanks to this awesome technology. Wanted to give you all a brief overview of the Young Leaders Forum itself and a big shout out to the other members of the YLF who helped organize this webinar today.
The ICMIF Young Leaders Forum is a network of young professionals that have been identified as strong candidates to be future leaders of our member companies. It was formed in 2016 in Copenhagen and seeks to add value to the young professionals themselves, to ICMIF, to the broader mutual and cooperative insurance sector and, of course, to the member companies. And seeks to do this by providing learning and development opportunities for young leaders, such as this webinar, the thematic reports that we will be producing, as well as other research projects. Provides a really unique chance for members to network and learn from each other by sharing best practices. ICMIF hosts several events throughout the year that ICMIF members can attend, and also we have a new LinkedIn page that you all will be able to interact on and we’re very excited about that and Ben will share more details a little later. And we also serve as a resource to help guide the discussions of the ICMIF Intelligence Committee, with a focus on the future generation.
Today, in light of today’s landscape, the Young Leaders Forum has strategically selected innovation structure and culture as the focus of our webinar, in hopes that together, we will be able to inspire and equip each other with more focus and with more knowledge and practices to transform your organizations, organizations that have really functioned for hundreds of years with limited urgency for change. But now we’re doing business in a world where the rate of change is exponential. As you all know, we’re in a time when technologies like AI and machine learning, cloud, Blockchain, social, Internet of Things are disrupting every step of our insurance value chains, a time when 10 years later, 50% of Fortune 500 companies are gone, in a time when customer expectations are not just set by our direct competitors but by experiences and services that our customers interact with every day, like Apple and Amazon.
This new reality helps paint the picture for the question that’ll shape our time together today. How are we as young leaders in the insurance industry supporting and building organizations that are nimble enough to innovate with these exciting changes to build products and experiences to help improve our members and customers’ lives both in the present and in the future? Today, we’re going to hear from three Millennial leaders that will discuss how their companies are successfully driving innovation and engaging young leaders like us in this change.
Our first speaker today is Pierre-Alexandre, joining us from Quebec City, Canada. Pierre works as the VP of Transformation at Desjardins. He started his career as an Actuary and after working for four years in rate making and reserving, he moved to be a Manager in process improvements and system solutions and claims. Most recently, he’s worked on integrating the Canadian activity of state farm before moving to his current assignment. With that, I will pass it off to Pierre to share his case study.
Pierre-Alexandre Jalbert:
Thank you, Ellie. Thank you, Ben. A pleasure being with all of you this morning. It’s also a little bit stressful to be the first one to speak, but I’ll get it started. So for the next 12 minutes I’ll give you maybe a brief overview of my company, talk to you about one of the major initiative we have going on right now, how it’s changing our company and also the life of our employees and obviously of the next generation and I want to take the time also to share some of our learning in that journey so far.
To get started, Desjardins, Desjardins at the group level is the largest credit union in Canada and Desjardins has a property and casualty insurance company, as well as a life insurance company. I personally work for the property and casualty insurance division, and we are the third largest player in the market. We specialize mainly in personal lines, where we are the second largest company and we have so far limited commercial exposure.
Our business model is a combination of direct insurance and with the recent acquisition of the state farm business, we also now have exclusive agents representing us in three market in Canada. We have over 3.4 million clients and we currently have more than 8,000 employees and 4,000 of them are frontline employees, so either sales agents or claims representative.
What we’re doing right now is we have a program call NeXT, it’s a short term to say New Enterprise in Expansion and Transformation and we just add Huge Transformation. What basically we’re doing is we’re changing all of our core system, because our current system have been built around 30 years ago. They’ve been home-build with our expertise in a context of where we were 30 years ago. The growing complexity of, let’s say, our business having multiple distribution channel, as well as all those new technology that are coming up with AI, for example, and specially like instantaneity, the digital capacities or systems that were built 30 years ago are not supporting this at all.
We’re changing all of our system through a program over seven, eight years, where we’ll be investing several hundreds of million to change all of them and we’re looking at the best of breed software approach. Which means instead of going with one provider to service all our needs, we’re trying to pick every best provider to build our new system, considering that there’s so much player out there and also so much expertise. And why we’re using this approach is also because we want to have access to the latest technology, the expertise that exist, that is very difficult to build internally. That’s the use case.
I would start by saying like bringing the latest IT technology can seem great, but really it has little value if, if, if you don’t have the right mindset, if you don’t have the right involvement of top management. And this starts by basically people thinking about, okay, what really is bringing value out of those technology to the client or to our internal efficiency. There’s so much thing out there, that you can be easily overwhelmed.
First, we are working very closely with top management to make sure that this initiative is a top priority from a business perspective, it’s not just an IT modernization. And as you can see probably in that slide, we’re involving over 400 people right now, working on this project, there’s contribution from every sector. The other aspect that was key as part of this program is we’re building our systems for the next 20 years and we need to develop our employees and especially the new generation that will be around for the next 20 years.
And as things are changing so fast, we also need to find the right combination of young talents that are willing to learn and continue to learn on a day to day basis, as well as not losing sight of the expertise we’ve built over the last 30 years. Obviously, this is also bringing a huge change in terms of role and responsibility. Some of the stuff was built internally before, now we’re using a provider. Some of the responsibility are shifting from IT to the business sector.
This is bringing also some important transformation and as I mentioned earlier, like thinking about, okay, we’re changing our system, we want to be able to access to Omnichannel capabilities. This is not the mindset that we’ve been two, three, four years ago. Bringing that new mindset to the organization and thinking differently about how you design your process, how you design your business rules really requires a significant effort and this is not something that you can do while you’re coding the solution. You need to do that before you start to involve IT, because as I mentioned, those capacity will bring you little value if you don’t do your business work.
My role as VP Transformation is to make sure that those people working on that program, those 400 people are well connected with top management, ensuring that we have their buy in on the different solution that they contribute in terms of resource, that they dedicate the right talent. And I’ve been meeting with probably over 50, 60 people in the last few months just to explain them what we’re doing, propose them mandates within that program that will develop them and suit what they’re looking at. Also in charge of all the reflection that are done before and one of the key things I want to share with you is that in terms of the mindset is really like while we’re building our new system is to have that dream big mindset.
We want to think as big as possible to make sure we’re putting the right foundation but we need to start small, though. So you can imagine all those new exciting process, put the right foundation in place, but then select which one is bringing the most value first and start with one and from that foundation, then continue to bring additional value. So I think this is something that’s very important and, yes, we’re bringing and talking a lot about an IT solution, a new system, but really, we’re bringing a new solution to frontline users and they need to understand the value of what they have in their end. They need to understand what are the expected behaviour in this new world. So we’re working on a lot of change management activity, training and all of that and there’s a lot of young talent involved in this.
Some of the key learnings I’ve share already but first I want is having a sponsor or someone from the top manage that’s assigned to every project to make sure that it’s a top priority at the organization level and when there’s issue, someone is there to help. Performing prep work, making sure that you secure what the value that’s been created in the past, but the same time, challenge the different business sector to clarify their vision and putting the right foundation in place. This is a huge investment on our side.
Having the right people in the right chair, with the right business mindset, it will take significant effort and we need people that are pragmatists, that are result oriented, and also client oriented. It’s easy to build those system or to do innovation, I’ll say, isolated, but having first line employees involved, the one that are in contact with the client, the ones that will use your new system or your new tools that you’re developing is so important and the last one is working as one team. I don’t have a word yet to say business and IT together but we should stop to say others, IT in this business. We should all work as one team because over time, if you want to be agile, you cannot do that split anymore.
And I want to leave with you with one question or one thing to reflect on. In terms of innovation, we often hear, “Oh, there’s a team that’s in charge of innovation or thinking about some new ideas and all of that.” But how can you contribute to spread innovation across your company so that it’s not just the thing of one team or one department? I will leave you with that thought and I’ll pass it on to my colleagues for the next presentation.
Ellie Anderson:
Thank you, Pierre. We’re inspired by the collaboration between business and IT at Desjardins. I think it’s really powerful the way that you guys are engaging all levels of employee and tenure and expertise through this massive initiative and I hope that will continue to change the culture for better innovation.
Next we will hear from Dominic. He’s joining us from Switzerland. He currently works as a Product Manager for Mobility Insurance and he’s been in that role for three years. Before, he was an intern, the general agency in marketing. He’s studying Business Administration in International Management, currently based in an Exchange Semester in Lima, Peru. He’s very eager to use the learnings of his personal entrepreneurship projects to drive innovation and continue the change at La Mobiliere. So Dominic, passing off to you.
Dominic Santschi:
Hello, everyone, and a warm welcome to my talk about my employer and how we are driving innovation to transform our business. To give you the context of what I will be talking about in the next minutes, we are at all risk insurance company and active in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. The company was founded as a cooperative in 1826 as the Swiss Association for the Mutual Insurance of Furniture Against Fire Damage. Almost 200 years later in 2017, La Mobiliere has more than 1.7 million customers and an annual premium volume of over CHF 3.8 billion. With current exchange rate of CHF 3.8 billion is more or less the same as $3.8 billion. This is only possible thanks to 79 largely independent general agencies with over 160 locations all over the country to ensure customer proximity. At the moment over 5,000 employees from 34 nations work in our company and 340 trainees and potential young leaders are helping us to keep track with the younger generations.
Looking only at the data and for instance, comparing growth rate of our company to the market, looking at profitability and customer satisfaction, it seems that we are perfectly doing well and there wouldn’t be the smallest need to change anything in our business model or in our people. This is why you might ask yourself, “Why does this guy talk about transforming his business when it is all functioning well?” The response is that things are not anymore as they used to be, as you all know, and our current success is based on the good work in the past. In other words, if we do not shape our future today, we will not be able to serve our clients of tomorrow effectively and efficiently.
To give you an example of how does innovation gap looks like, I would like to talk about the channels we use to interact with our customers and contrast them with an old experience from the National Police of Peru. When you look at the infographic on the left hand side of the slide, you see that in Switzerland, 88% of all participants from this questionnaire of the bank Credit Suisse were younger than 25 years old, said that WhatsApp is their preferred communication channel to talk with their friends. Looking at the screenshot of our website below, you can see that we don’t provide this channel to interact with our customers. Do you think that the new generation is willing to change their preferred channel to talk with us? In our case, a clear and well established policy of how to use WhatsApp as a communication channel with our customers is still not in place.
As a contrast, as you can see on the right hand side of the slide, the National Police of Peru, managed to use WhatsApp as a new communication channel for civilians to receive not so urgent messages. Can it be that the National Police of Peru is doing better than us or should we try to improve our offerings to align better to the needs and wants of our next generation?
As a second example, I would like to highlight the importance of being prepared for change in the sales and distribution process as well. At the moment, we have a very traditional view of our customers and their sales agents and employee have a lot more knowledge about our offerings than the client itself. In other words, you can call this the principal agent problem, where our agents know a lot more about our product and the market offerings than the customer does. However, what if I tell you that emerging technology might upgrade humans and let their brains directly access the internet? I know this sounds very far fetched to you, but I invite to read this article about cyborgs after the webinar, when we pass you over the slides and watch out for products and services as the examples on the right side like Flex implants, Mind Machines which is actually technology which is integrated in your body to upgrade you as a human being and see that these things are not artificial but they already exist somehow.
Summing up all of this and getting back to my initial question about why there is a need to drive innovation and transform our business, I would like to share this extract of our annual report with you. In the report, it is written that, “In order to sustain our success, we need and want to remain flexible and develop our company and business by means of innovation, diversity, and an interdisciplinary approach.” Adding more weight to this vision, it is a fact that innovative companies that are always renewing themselves are more successful in the long term than those with low innovative power.
After searching for different approaches to make everyone aware of this in our company, we started with the transformation of ourselves to drive innovation and set the foundation of long-term success. You might ask yourself how this looks like when I tell you that we changed ourselves. It looks like this. By showing ourselves that change is actually a sure thing and not only written in management magazines, increased drastically. As a result engagement and motivation of employees increased because they could imagine themselves, that also they will have different expectations on an insurance company.
However, it is clear that by only thinking about the future and being aware of change innovation is not automatically the result. How do we use all this brain power and potential to improve and transform our business? To stay Switzerland most personal insurance company, which is our vision since a lot of years, La Mobiliere found its own approach to innovation.
We do not only use a big part of our investments to sustain the modernization established business model, which is illustrated as the big cruise ship on the right hand side of the side, but also are strongly committed to identify, test, and develop new and maybe disruptive business models. This new disruptive business models are illustrated by the speedboats on the left hand side of the cruise ship and are also used as terms to describe small intern start-ups. The entire structure of the approach is called dual transformation and it is basically about two things, on one hand it is about the modernization, the digitalization of the established business model and on the other hand it is an enabler for the development of new business model and ideas who complement and strengthen our established business.
To be more specific, it’s important to mention how the work in speedboats. The speedboats work quickly, in small teams of three to five people, independently, but in a good coordination with the core business, always starting from unsolved customer problems and in small experience and learning cycles. What they do is that they try to build a small prototype, measure the results and learn from it and make it better in the next time. They are guided by lean start-up approach and apply the principles and methods of design thinking.
To share more value with you and with your organization, I want to quickly present to you the essential building blocks of our innovation process for our speedboats. As you can see on this very wild slide, there are basically four building blocks of this internal innovation process. I encourage you to read all of this small written text. But I would just like to highlight the four steps which we are using to start a new idea or a new business model which might complement in the future and how we bring it.
What we do is that we start by doing an exploration phase and identify and prioritize the different promising topics. As a second step, we establish the problem-solution fit, and identify specific customer pains, gains, and jobs. As a third step, we do the quantitative validation of underlying hypothesis and launch a most viable product to a test market. We do the product and market fit. And in the end after we know about the needs and wants of the customers, what the current market would actually bring to us, we try to scale this offering and build a scalable product based on the most valuable product.
As a first suggestion of today, I invite you to study the process in detail after the webinar and try to apply it to a current project in your company or in your mindset. If any questions occur, I am glad to support you here.
After this packed but comprehensive slide with our approach to drive innovation, I want to mention that not only the employees need to be prepared for the new era, but also the infrastructure. Imagine having a very innovative, creative, and agile team work in a very small and dark room. How do you think their motivation will last?
This is why La Mobiliere decided to transform its business in the same way as its industry gets transformed and build an innovation space, which is on the left-hand side on the top. In this space, all of the employees are enabled to do workshops, to work on projects or also try to identify new business models and develop them together. As another part, you can see on the right side that we transformed or the offices. We used a lot of more colors and lights and what we also do is we use new approaches as design thinking to drive innovation and make our business offerings better.
I want to share two examples with you where we actually drove innovation already and we slightly transformed our business. The first one is Tooyoo, which is a secure digital platform that stores all your important information that your loved ones need in case something happens to you. This innovation was closely aligned to the life insurance offerings that we had and if you would like to get more information about this, I also invite you to open the link afterwards to the webinar and if you have any questions, just get back to me and I’m glad to give you the answers as soon as possible.
A second innovation which we already brought to a really mature level is the FindMe tracker, which lets you search, protect and monitor your favourite items anywhere. Even though there were several challenges to integrate the value proposition of this hardware into our business model where we are selling insurance, the project led to many valuable insights and important learnings. As you can see in this example, we tried to make a combination of the hardware product and our insurance product which is basically intangible and not that useful in the daily life of our customers.
To sum up my presentation of today, I want to share a very provocative quote with you. Warren Buffet once said that, “It’s better to hang out with people better than you and you should pick out associates whose behaviour is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.”
Let’s make it more apply to yourself. From whom do you normally learn the most? Do you think that your company would become better while hanging out with you? Even though I want to leave these questions open to you, I would love to provide you with an easy to understand and applicable four step process, which is again provocative to push innovation and lead change as a young leader.
As I already mentioned before, in my opinion the best way to drive innovation to transform your business is by starting to become innovative and transform yourself. On this life changing journey, this four step process might help you to act more structurally and feature those in the most efficient and satisfying way. At first, I invite you to change your mindset and become an entrepreneur. Try to take more responsibility to work on projects which you are convinced that they will add value to someone. In other words, try to do your projects and ask yourself how your company can help you to do it. Become innovative and transform yourself, because if you’re convinced of what you’re doing, I’m sure that you will be able to also convince your peers.
As a second step, you need to define where you want to go, create your individual vision. Namely, if you know in which direction you will transform yourself, you will be able to help your company transform in the right direction to serve you and your generation over time. Since visualization is one of the most powerful mind exercises that you can do, it will help you to structure your approach.
Thirdly, become a front runner and lead change in the right direction. Use the opportunities of our generation to collect new insights from different cultures, empathize with diverse people, offer feedback, and stay open minded. This will help you to become a front-runner, which leads his team in the right direction of sustainable, long term success. And lastly, use a personal Kanban board to track progress. For all of you who don’t know, the Kanban board is basically a visualization of tasks which you need to start, which you already started and working on, and which tasks you already accomplished.
Since you are now executing your projects, instead the ones of your employer and applying this four step process, you have the responsibility to monitor and lead everything. The Kanban board might help you to make this in the most efficient way that is possible and to use post its to update the board with your task and accomplishment, gives you more structure in your daily life. Going back to the presentation of Pierre, this might be a help to answer his question, while thinking about the first step process and how you could push thinking and lead change as a young leader.
Overall it is clear that this approach might bring along some risks that maybe for instance, your visions do not fit exactly to the visions of your company. This is why I invite you to use the first steps as an inspiration, instead of a rigid manual. Finally, it is about if you take the responsibility to drive innovation and transform your business or if you don’t.
With these words, I want to finish my presentation and give back to Ellie. If you have any questions concerning my contents, my employer, and anything else, I will be very much looking forward to getting in touch with you. Many thanks for your attention and good luck with all your initiatives.
Ellie Anderson:
Thank you, Dominic, for providing us some steps on how to lead ourselves. I just love how La Mobiliere has set up a model of speedboats that employ human centered design to really create new products and services around those customers needs and jobs to be done, and that you didn’t just stop at the process but you partnered it with redesigned teams and those creative spaces. I hope you all can be inspired by that as well.
Next up we have Patrick Boyd, who is joining us from St. Paul, Minnesota. Patrick leads the mergers and acquisitions group for Securian Financial, which includes evaluating and executing acquisitions of mature companies, as well as investing into early venture start-up companies. He spent most of his career in corporate mergers and acquisitions, working in financial services, health care, and life insurance, and today, he intends to share how Securian Financial is leveraging partnerships and investments with Fintech and insure tech companies to drive innovation at the organization. Patrick, over to you.
Patrick Boyd:
Thanks, Ellie. Good morning, everyone, and potentially good afternoon and good evening, depending on where you are today. As Ellie mentioned, today I’m going to be talking about one way that we think about innovation here at Securian Financial. Our company founded 1880, very long history in the life insurance market. We’re a diversified financial service organization based in Minnesota. We serve nearly 19 million customers today, both in the US and Canada. And for general sizing, we’re about the 10th largest insurance company in the US, the third largest writer of group life insurance and just recently we were named #462 within the Fortune 500 ranking. Today we have about 5,300 employees and representatives and that is based both, again, in the US and Canada.
Across the various different markets that we serve today, as I said, we’re a diverse financial service organization. We have about 10 business lines focused on four segments, which includes individuals and families, individual life products, annuities to employers and employees, which is employers offering benefits to their employees. We also work a lot with banks, credit unions and other finance companies, to provide products for their customers, as well as institutions, more on the asset management side, as well.
As Ellie and others talked about earlier today, we are seeing many different external forces reshaping our industry. And we need to think about that and how do we stay competitive within the markets that we serve today. From a macro and market trend perspective, from a changing customer insight perspective, Dominic mentioned around the WhatsApp. New Millennials are coming up and how do they communicate, we think about different customer experiences and different ways of dealing with those customers. We’re also seeing emerging technology trends that are changing how we interact with our customers and clients today.
When we think about innovation, innovation in my view is a very broad term that can be executed in many different ways. Within a portfolio view, one way to execute innovation is around a partnership approach, and that’s something that we have taken and built that within our organization today. And kind of our guiding principle and statement for partnerships is that “We partner to stay on the forefront of trends and technologies, better preparing us to manage disruptive transformations and to align with changing consumer expectations.”
As it’s been mentioned many times already today, the markets that we serve are shifting and we’re seeing new emergence of technologies that us as a more mature life company are not able to keep pace with. And when we look out in the marketplace around artificial intelligence, Blockchain, many other things that were discussed, we don’t have those internal capabilities, nor could we develop those capabilities as quickly as other companies in the marketplace and that leads to our partnership strategy.
And this gets into really the specifics of why we view partnership with these earlier stage companies as a great opportunity. One, as I mentioned, the cost is a key factor. Leveraging a third party is often significantly less expensive than building a new capability or a new tech platform from scratch. If we want to build new data analytics capabilities using third party resources, we can find those partnerships, partner with them and develop a capability in a much less costly approach than going and hiring a bunch of individuals, bringing them and letting them work for a year or two building out those capabilities.
In terms of user experience, it’s another thing where as we look at start-up companies, they typically think about their user experience first and work backwards to how do they develop and deliver that experience. For us, being a more mature life insurance business, that’s a little bit different mindset for us where we typically think about the product first. We develop that and then think about what is that customer experience later on down the road. This is changing the thinking there.
Time is another key important factor. As I mentioned, start-up companies are able to have an idea, taking a little bit of funding, and develop and go to market within a year or less with a new capability or product. And if you compare that to our processes, it could take us a year or two years to develop a new IT platform or a new project. Here these companies are just able to move much faster and so developing a partnership with them, increases our speed to market for new opportunities.
And then lastly, partnering with these emerging start-up companies also helps for our brand, not only from a customer expectation perspective, but it also helps as we think about recruiting the new talent into the organization. Being able to say that we partner with a lot of new emerging companies is attractive to employees as they looked for comparing us against other of our peers, and it also helps with retention as well.
When we try to solve the problem for how do you develop a partnership and venture strategy, really what we have is we structured two groups and these two groups really work very closely together. One from a peer partnership perspective, we have a team that is out in the marketplace trying to identify, foster, and build commercial opportunities between start-up companies and our Securian financial businesses. They are looking for and evaluating, is this an opportunity that we could partner and either have additional products sold through them, a different way to interact with our customers or other various ways to develop a commercial relationship.
My team, working with a partnership group, really comes at it from a different angle which is can we provide financing and investment dollars to help that company grow. Can we invest in ideas that will maybe today are a little bit horizon two, horizon three, they’re not ready yet? But we can take an early investment into those companies, start to learn about the capabilities and what they’re working on. And once we feel comfortable with the business model that they’ve developed, we can position and move them over to our partnerships team.
For our group, when we think about developing and identifying partnerships that will be innovative for our organization, we tend to look at different trends and where we focus on is these emerging opportunities or as I would say maybe horizon two or horizon three opportunities. Clearly, there’s opportunities today in the marketplace where we’re seeing disruptors. They’re impacting us from the existing perspective, and we need to have the business units working on plans to execute and then strategize against that. But when we think about those more emerging opportunities, the artificial intelligence, Blockchain, some of the other capabilities that are talked about, they’re a little bit further off before being fully adopted within at least the US market today. That’s where our teams are focused on.
These are the opportunities where today our business unit leaders are really focused on executing plans today, trying to hit their numbers for this year. We’re trying to take a longer-term horizon view to say, “What if those things are going to be coming down the pipeline that are maybe small today but potentially disruptive in the future?” And that’s where we’re focusing our time and effort to find companies in that space who are thinking differently about approaching the markets that we serve today, and then either developing a partnership with them or finding an investment into that company.
When we identify a partnership, we like to go through a thought process to really say, “What is the area of opportunity that we want to work with this partner company with?” That could be there for distribution opportunities, finding new cost efficiencies on the back end, or developing new products. And then when we think about where do we want to interact with these companies, we also then think of what is the best way to define and have an engagement with this company. What we’ve seen that works best is the proof of concept phase.
This is a very early prototype with very limited investment, limited resource to get a idea up and running. One example here is that we worked with a company and we were thinking about developing new product that was new to Securian Financial, that’ll be new for the marketplace and we worked with this company to send out a survey to their customers and saying, “Is this a product that you’d be interested in? Here’s some of the dynamics of it and here’s generally the pricing range.” By them going out and emailing their customers, we got immediate feedback that said, “Love the product but the pricing may be too high.” And so immediately that’s a quick way to really test a concept to say, “Hey, we’re onto something here, but we have to go back and continue to work on it.”
And that saved us a lot of time of going through developing a product, getting it registered, licensed, which can be a year or two-year process. By using this proof of concept process with this early stage company, we’re able to figure out very quick learnings, apply them back to our product, and make it better for when we go live. Other type of opportunities are developing a pilot or a full partnership. These depending on the opportunity will make sense in how mature the company is, but typically, we’d like to go in the order of proof of concept first, build that idea, pilot it, and then go to that full partnership.
As an example, this is one collaboration that we just had. We ended up investing in a company called Gabi. Gabi is a US company that is focused on, really it’s an autonomous insurance shopping and comparison tool for individuals. There’s a lot of different priced shopping tools on the marketplace today but we really like this technology as a way, as this is kind of always in the background, shopping and looking for the best prices for an individual, without having that individual having to go proactively continue to shop.
We have seen so far in very early stages that individuals are not always thinking about when their term comes up, “Should I go out and shop again?” For the best policy, this technology is always doing that for them. We made a small investment in this company and then after making the investment, we brought this company into our organization and we are now working through certain partnership opportunities with them to either use their technology on our platforms or to find new ways to sell products through this opportunity here.
When we think about innovation in our organization, in your organizations today, I think this is a pretty good framework, which is you need to have aspiration to continue to innovate. And it’s not just one individual’s responsibility, it is everyone’s responsibility. I think what has worked well in our organization, and many different organizations as well is innovation is something that people are thinking of from the top perspective, from the most senior leaders to the lower level individuals who have just come on and started working for the organization. If everybody’s thinking about new innovative ways, some of those will start to bubble up and you’ll get some momentum around that.
That goes into sharing the learnings, so when we are out in the marketplace talking to these new early stage companies, we are learning really fascinating things that we try to bring back to the business units and the leaders to say, “Here’s a different way of thinking about a problem or a new opportunity,” that can sometimes build momentum and find a solution within our organization today. And then it’s also a portfolio approach, when you think about start-up companies and venture opportunities and partnerships, it’s difficult to go out and find the best partnership and that’s going to be only one. Typically, we like to find different opportunities in different spaces, make smaller bets and see which ones lead to success.
And then also urgency, so a motto that we have here internally is that you want to fail fast, and I think Dominic mentioned very similar which is you want to be able to fail, take your learnings, reapply those learnings and continue to work on your process. We’re okay with failing fast but we also want to look back and realize where do we have a misstep, reapply that and make the process better going forward.
When we think about from a venture and partnership perspective, the other way to think about innovation is this is how we developed our model, which is get connected in the marketplace. This is something that any individual within any organization today can start to just build relationships within your local community for start-up and venture opportunities. There’s some examples here on the screen that before I got into this role and really starting to look at venture, I had no idea that there were so many organizations in my backyard in our local city here that are focused on venture and start-up opportunities. We started building relationships with these organizations and it’s been a great way to find and foster new opportunities in that venture and start-up area.
Once you have some great ideas about partnerships and new opportunities, develop your pitch. How do you speak about these opportunities to your senior leaders. You’re in the elevator, you seem them for two minutes, how do you share these learnings in a very concise way to them about what you’re seeing in that marketplace. And then once you’re finding some alliance in there, bring other individuals in, help share the message, help get them involved and once you have that momentum, you can start to do really great things.
Ellie Anderson:
Great, well, thank you, Patrick, for sharing your partnership strategy and the value that these partnerships can add to learn quickly, build a strong portfolio, and positively impact the processes and the experience that Securian provides its members. I really loved that challenge to get connected to networks, networks of start-ups and other innovators in and outside of the industry. It’s really great to get out and learn for our own personal development, as well as that of our companies.
Now for our remaining 10 minutes, we are going to transition into audience question and answer time for our panellists. Just a reminder that you are able to submit questions in the chat function of the webinar.
Panellists, we already have a few that have come in, I will state the question and if you would like to respond, go ahead and just jump in.
Our first question from the audience is “What skills and mindsets do you feel are most important for young leaders to develop to be successful innovators leading change?”
Pierre-Alexandre Jalbert:
I can start. I think the first one is… and I think Dominic referred to this around communication. We can have great idea but somehow you need to sell those ideas, I would say how do you prepare to present them, present the value and all of that. Communication and also I think it’s around convincing people. There’s many opportunities out there and you also want to keep some focus and make sure they deliver and execute on some of them. If you want to add something, I think you need to convince people, you need to communicate well. I think those are some of the very important skill set, your ability to influence will serve you very well.
Patrick Boyd:
Yeah, and I would also echo that with for us as we thought about developing our partnership opportunities with venture companies, it is fine being kind of no regrets initiatives, which is for us to go out and just attend certain local events. We’re starting to develop understanding and learning of the marketplace without having to invest any dollars or put together a large business plan, is a way for us to very slowly and quickly and very cost efficiently start to develop some learnings around innovation and new opportunities.
Dominic Santschi:
And I would just like to add that when you’re asking about the main skills that are needed as an individual but also as a company, I feel like the most important thing is that you should understand your customers and as Pierre said in his presentation, you should be client oriented. And if you listen to the customer, if you look at the customer, what he or she is doing and willing to do, I think you’re on the right track.
Ellie Anderson:
Great, thanks, everybody. This next one has to do with your experiences. ” As you look to spread innovative thinking across your organization, what have been the most helpful tactics that seem to move the needle on culture at your organization? Is it trainings, seminars, building tools or…” This person wants to know what have you tried that has worked and what has not worked.
Dominic Santschi:
Maybe I can start here because I included a slide of how we transformed ourself and how we involved people in the transformation process and showed them that change is a sure thing. This initiative where we had some external people transforming a couple of our employees and picture them, pretending to be 20 or 30 years older, I think added a lot of value to almost all the employees, because they saw that they look really realistic and it’s a sure thing that we need to prepare ourself now so that we are able to serve these customers in the future as well. But all the other stuff is for sure all about the commitment of the senior management which is really important.
Patrick Boyd:
Yeah, I think that’s right, as well, and it’s a get everyone involved. I think that has worked well for us, not just only from the partnership perspective but just broadly about innovation. It is everybody on a day to day basis, trying to think about new opportunities. It’s not the individual’s role or a group’s role, it’s everyone’s role and the more you can get people involved, and trying to share opportunities and get them to think innovatively, that starts to spread through the organization and you start to build that innovative culture.
Pierre-Alexandre Jalbert:
I think there’s, you know every time you hear sentence like, “Fail fast,” you also need to understand how deep this can mean. Like if you fail fast to step one and you never experience step two to 10, you lack some learnings as well. In our case, one of the solution, we had put in place, we had no choice to put it in place because as part of the integration of state farm, we didn’t have the solution to receive the commercial lines activity we had to build one. And we failed several times doing it, to be honest, but we had no choice to get to the end point.
And through every step, I think we failed somehow and then we succeeded, and this has made us realize how tough it is. We probably changed the governance of the project, I don’t know, six, seven times. We changed methodology. We try a bunch of different things and I would say, yes, it’s true, “Fail fast,” but it’s also true that having a commitment to get to the end will serve you well. Yeah, making sure you don’t lose sight of this.
Ellie Anderson:
All right, thank you. I wanted to give each one of you a few seconds to share a final thought, may it be a question or a challenge to the young leaders listening that they can really take back and apply to their lives and to their organizations to push their thinking. Just one thought from each of you would be great to close it up.
Pierre-Alexandre Jalbert:
I would go back to my question around spreading it across the company. If it’s the thing of you people… Yes, having like the… I love the image of the boat Dominic shared, but then after that you still need to move the big boat. Once you identify your speed boat, how do you get the big boat to follow. I think this is the main challenge all of our organization that have 10, turned 20, 50, a 100 years of experience that are carrying their existing book need to figure out.
Dominic Santschi:
I would invite you to look at this four step process again and just ask yourself if you’re already there or just try to make it through and especially use the Kanban board and try to get your approach a better structure.
Patrick Boyd:
And I would end with depending on where your company is in terms of the innovation spectrum, if you’re a little bit further behind, think about ways that you can go back and start to spark that momentum in your organization. And I go back to the point of can you find no regret opportunities which is very little investment, very little resource consumption but it’s a way to kind of test a model with innovation within the organization and once you get some momentum there, potentially get more resources, more investment dollars going forward.
Ellie Anderson:
Well, thank you all for joining us today. We are very grateful for the participation and look forward to more opportunities to engage with you all. Just to finish, we did receive more questions and you can visit the LinkedIn page that Ben will share. We’ll be posting those questions and give the panellists the opportunity to respond to those questions over the next few days.
Ben Telfer:
Thank you, Ellie, and thank you to today’s presenters, Pierre, Dominic, and Patrick, and thank you to all the audience for joining today’s webinar. We hope you found it both interesting and valuable.
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