Steve Leicester: 

Good afternoon everyone. My name is Steve Leicester and I’m the CFO of ICMIF. I’m delighted to welcome you to our first webinar, Shaping Leadership Role in Sustainable Finance.  

In today’s webinar, we’re talking about sustainability and how two of our ICMIF members with the help of the Prince’s Accounting for Sustainability Project, known as A4S, embedded sustainability into everyday decision-making. I’m delighted to introduce Jessica Fries Executive Chairman from A4S, Karen Higgins, Chief Finance Officer, from The Co-operators in Canada, and Warren Zaccaro, Chief Finance Officer from Securian in the US. A very warm welcome to you all. Jessica, perhaps you would like to set the scene and start us off in this ever changing world that we now face. 

Jessica Fries: 

Thanks a lot Steve. And it’s a pleasure to be speaking to everyone and sharing a little bit more about our work and particularly the work that we do with the CFO community. To start with, I thought it would be useful just to reflect back to the beginning of this year, which has clearly been incredibly challenging one for all of us, and think about some of the conversations that were happening at the beginning of the year. One of the things that always marks the start of the year is the release of the Global Risk Report by the World Economic Forum. And I think it’s quite interesting to track then what they have highlighted over the years, and you’ve seen an increasing focus on some of the environmental and social risks seen as highest likelihood and impact. Just to touch on some of the top risks that they highlighted in that report. First, failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation, extreme weather events, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, water crises, natural disasters, cyber attacks, and human-made environmental disasters. 

Now, of course, a lot of the focus was particularly on climate change and that growing focus by regulators, by bodies around the world, the investment community, companies and others, that climate was a material financial risk, and a growing response to that risk. But of course it wasn’t limited to climate. Now, over the past year, I think we’ve seen that focus subside slightly, but the facts remain. The IPCC – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – highlighted that we needed a 45% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, reduced to net zero by 2050, which is a really radical transformation in the global economy. And if you look at the scale of that transformation, when a lot of the world was in pause from an economic perspective, so with lockdowns as a result of the response to the pandemic, you saw the kind of scale of reduction in emissions that would be needed every year to achieve these kinds of cuts. 

And that’s clearly not an economically or socially viable option. We really need to be finding some of the solutions that drive that transformation, if we’re to avoid the very serious consequences and risks. But of course, I think over the last year, of course has been the pandemic that has shaped, I think all of our lives and responses, and looking forward to hearing from Warren and Karen as we go through the discussion today, just how the context of the last several months has shaped their own thinking and their responses to that sustainability agenda and their ability to respond to some of these issues, which are having of course, near term consequences, but are evolving over much longer timescales than the current crisis. 

Of course, I don’t need to add that these risks and issues are very much interconnected, including of course the pandemic and its causes. In 2015, five years ago, the United Nations agreed a set of sustainable development goals. And today is the first day of the UN General Assembly, New York Climate Week, under focus on looking at progress around these SDGs. Certainly from our perspective, I think that they provide still a very useful framework for thinking about sustainability, what it means and the breadth of issues that we need to look at, in that interconnected way, if we are to create a sustainable future, and the world that we can and want to live in and thrive in. 

For us thinking about sustainability really means looking across this breadth of issues, some of them, social economic, and environmental, and finding ways to really look at how finance can play a role. But Steve, I know from a corporatism mutual perspective, this really touches to the heart of the purpose of an organization. I wonder if maybe hand back to you just to say a little bit more of your perspective of what some of these themes might mean for members. 

Steve Leicester: 

Well, I think it’s fair to say that as corporatism mutual Jessica, we view the world slightly differently from most. We take a much longer term view than most stock companies, sort of enterprises and companies and such. We can take that much longer term view.

Jessica Fries: 

Yeah, absolutely. And certainly Karen and Warren, I think as we go forward, be interested in your perspectives, because I think based in Canada and the US, every country around the world, I think you have maybe different areas of focus. Thinking from an accounting for sustainability perspective, A4S was established by his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales back in 2004. And at the launch a couple of years later at our annual summit, he underlined at that point, I think a long way ahead of many others, that there was a time when we could say there was either a complete lack of knowledge or at least room for doubt about the consequences for our planet of our actions, that time has gone. We now know all too clearly what we are doing and that we need to do something about it urgently. Better accounting must be part of that process. 

Since he said that, I think that the knowledge, the awareness has only increased and the urgency of course, even more so. Why should sustainability matter to finance? Through all of our work with all of the different finance communities we work with around the world, we find that there are five reasons that really come to mind consistently. The first around efficiency, and finding ways to do more with less, particularly in the environmental agenda, but also around some of the broader aspects of what sustainable development and a sustainable business means and looks like. You can find reduced costs and using less often means costing less. 

At a time when organizations are really under pressure from a cost perspective, finding ways to focus on that as an objective is clearly really important, and the ability to cut costs in a way that does create positive impact, I think again is something really important to be able to do. Second is risk mitigation. We’ve been doing a lot of work focused on responses from the CFO community and how finance teams are helping their organizations to navigate through the current crisis. And one of the things that has come up time and again, I think is that point on risk and different types of risk, particularly, along value chains. 

Tools that can be used like scenario analysis to more effectively look at head at some of the risks from an environmental social governance perspective that we maybe haven’t fully costed in or fully understood. Third, competitive and revenue opportunities. If we are to respond to those challenges, there are huge potential opportunities from doing so. And again, innovation and sustainability lens can really drive new thinking innovation response, and finally employee engagement and development and retention. And again, at a time when people are really under pressure, actually finding ways that connect into that purpose and value, I think is again, really important. 

The flip side of that, why should sustainability matter to finance and what can finance bring to support their organization. Finance is an integrating function, it really cuts through the heart of the organization and connects into all dimensions of what the organization is and does. It can be very powerful in terms of responding to some of the challenges, finding those opportunities. And of course, providing all of the information from the strategic planning process, through the decision-making performance and reporting, that enables the organization to set their compass and then track performance and respond. 

Credibility, we find that whether it’s the CFO or the broader finance team really brings a lot of credibility. Often, not the voice that one might hear on some of these topics. And then finally directing resources. At A4S, we really focus on inspiring finance leaders, looking at how we can help to turn that desire and belief that something needs to happen, and that finance has a role to play, into transforming decision-making and action, and looking at how we can scale up action globally at the kind of pace and scale that we really need. 

We work across all parts of finance and the work that we’re doing with ICMIF particularly is focusing on that role of the CFO and finance team. But we of course also work with other parts of the finance community. And for many of you the work that we do with investors and asset owners might be equally relevant. As I mentioned, A4S was established in 2004, and there’s been a huge amount of change in the world within which we’re working. But also some of the things that we have achieved over the years, and particularly our CFO Leadership Network of which Warren and Karen are both members. We’ve seen that CFO perspective change over the years. From our focus, I think fairly narrowly, which is characterized from one of the early interviews we did, very focused on the financial dimensions. 

Too many CFOs now thinking that yes, sustainability and a sustainable organization really sits at the center of any sustainable business. And I think you’re seeing more and more research from the big investment houses and research houses, which actually underpin that the two go hand in hand. A snap shot of our members, and it’s a growing network. And certainly at the end of the call today, we’ll touch on some of the ways that for those of you who are interested, you can get involved in our CFO and wider finance team activities. I touched on how we transform decision-making. There’s a huge amount of work that really Karen and Warren can talk to because it’s them and their teams who do all of the heavy lifting. We prepare a lot of essential guides, really unpicking all of the different areas that finance teams do in their day jobs and thinking about how you can really build some of these issues into the heart of decision-making. 

Really developed by finance, for finance, and lots of very practical tools that finance teams can leverage. And Karen, I think this might be a good moment to connect in with you. We’ve seen through those guides a lot of areas that have been consistently there. How do you embed into different areas of decision-making? The kind of impacts and dependencies an organization faces. That question and challenge of short, medium, long term, the need to think outside the narrow boundaries of the organization, and importantly think across all of the stakeholders. We found some of these consistent themes coming through in the here and now, as well as some of the longer term activities that our members have done. But particularly one of the guides that we did which The Co-operators has really done some deep dive and prepared a worked example around is the guide on social and human capital accounting. And with the pressure on teams in the current context, maybe I could hand over to you to talk a little bit more about The Co-operator’s response, and let me know when you need the slides move forward. 

Karen Higgins: 

Thank you Jessica, and thank you to ICMIF for giving me and specifically The Co-operators an opportunity to talk a little bit more about some of the work that we’ve done with one of the papers that Jessica has just described on human and social capital. At The Co-operators, we had an opportunity to profile our work by using the working paper on human and social capital, and allow us an opportunity to share a little bit of what we had done. Several years ago, we embarked on a mental health initiative. And on the slide, we just talked about why it was important for us as an organization to focus on that. And it really took the form of two pieces, one quite large piece, and that was really about the mental health of our employee group, and how they were adapting to variety of issues that they are faced within society today. 

And then to a smaller extent, because part of our organization is a life insurer, it was recognized that our group benefits clients would be experiencing similar things to what The Co-operators were experiencing. Why tackle mental health? Well, up on the screen, it talks about the key thing and that we want it to ensure that we were a catalyst for a mentally healthy society. One of our core is to be a catalyst for a sustainable society, and this was just the second traunch into that work. We also recognize at that time, that mental health was really an unmet need for Canadian communities. Clearly the issue has been around for many, many years, but the talking about it, the bringing it forward and making it a visible issue really was not out there, and we felt that it was critical to the success of our organization to really bring it forward and start to dive deeper into what we could do. 

And then of course, as many employers, well, have seen in their own experiences, that we were clearly starting to see an increasing level of medical leads associated with mental health issues. And that was clearly having an impact on profitability. It was having an impact on staff morale, on employee productivity, et cetera. Lots of legitimate reasons why we needed to focus on the initiative. And if you want to advance one more slide, let’s talk a little bit more around what that meant. All makes good sense to embark on an initiative like this, certainly at the core, all of us were believing this was absolutely the right thing to do. But like any big initiative, particularly one that’s going to cost the organization, we felt that it was critical to do a business case to support the work. And that’s really where finance stepped in. 

We could outline all the why’s that it would make sense, but we needed to attach financials to it, so that we could really get behind, and in some ways, proving that the strategy made sense. The finance team working very closely with our group benefits partners, as well as our HR partners, we’re able to attach the benefits to this business case, attaching actual numbers to the why behind it. Obviously we also spent time focusing on the cost, that tends to be the much easier part. And then as the initiatives was supported by the financials, we moved forward with the implementation. And then where finance came in at the end, was reporting and monitoring, supporting the collective strategy team and developing a scoreboard along with a series of key performance indicators that we could monitor around the success of this initiative. 

Lots of good reasons. And the last slide, if you can advance these, just talks about some of the benefits that we have seen already since we embarked on this initiative. The first and foremost is that it was really fulfilling part of the purpose behind our organization. And again, the catalyst for a sustainable healthy workspace. It really did move forward, that sense of staff wellbeing and how we could improve the overall staff wellbeing. And well, we’ll spend some time later on in this webinar talking about the impacts of COVID-19 on our businesses. I can tell you that this is one that’s been so important to us. I had said several times over the last few months that I’m so thankful that we did a mark on this initiative so that our foundation around mental health was in place as we went into this very challenging time for our employee group. 

But one of the other benefits is that we could really proactively manage and address the emerging risks that we were seeing for both the business, as well as HR. As I talked about earlier, we were seeing that increasing trend of employee leaves. We were seeing lots of absenteeism and we were also seeing lots of presenteeism, in the sense that people were still coming to work, but really not fully engaged because of the challenges that were in place. And one big part of this initiative was training all of our leaders across the organization to really help employees as they were going through these issues, to be cognizant of them, to really be present with their staff and really to a certain extent see these issues that were at play. Now, of course, in our current environment, seeing those issues is way more challenging, but that fundamental training that we have even in a virtual environment, does help us connect in and ensure that people are doing okay. 

The platform that we put in place really does allow employees to come forward, to put up their hand and say, “I’m really struggling in this virtual environment. I need some additional help. Can you support me? Can you give me guidance,” et cetera. And some of the additional steps that we’ve taken right now is really make that very, very visible to our employee group. We’ve had leaders come forward and say, “I’m struggling and here is how I’m coping.” And we’ve had others within our internal internet that post things regularly, “Here is how I’m coping. I’m going for walks. I’m listening to music,” whatever the case may be. And again, having been very transparent and supportive to our employee group has really helped that. 

Last but not least, we are an organization that has, as I said, a group benefits business as part of it, and so this has really helped us identify and explore new markets and potentially emerging opportunities. We have found ways to support not only our employees, but also our clients with different therapies around mental health. Rather than just perhaps getting a prescription for medication, we’ve introduced to our broad client base, virtual cognitive therapy, which we can in our current context has been very helpful to our staff and to our clients, in order to think about different ways to cope with their challenges rather than just drug therapy. With that, I will pause, and Steve, I’ll turn it back to you for the next part of our webinar. 

Steve Leicester: 

Yes Karen, if you wouldn’t mind, perhaps you could speak about how The Co-operators have coped with COVID over the last few months. 

Karen Higgins: 

Absolutely. I’d be happy to do that. If I could just get you to go back one slide, and this particular slide just outlines kind of at the onset, how we tackled COVID. And it really kind of takes the form of three areas. The first one was really getting our business continuity plans up and running. The slide says mid March, but we really started back in February with our infectious disease response. We were seeing on the global landscape, an increasing rate of infections happening outside of Canada’s borders, but recognizing that the potential existed, that this could come into Canada’s borders. And of course, in mid-March with the notification that this was now a pandemic, we moved very quickly to moving all of our employees and our advisors to a work from home environment. And that was pretty challenging, but very necessary, because one of our key statements that we were using throughout this response, but certainly at the beginning, was to protect the health and safety our employees and the communities in which we operate. 

One of the benefits was that we were able to continue all of our critical activities, a full 100%, despite this change, and that included all of our financial reporting requirements. Obviously mid-March is just before quarter end for us, and we had a launch right into a virtual quarter end, that we’ve never done before, but we were very successful in continuing to move forward. We obviously put into place some very fast response actions. We started to look very hard at some of our underwriting processes and had to clearly define where we had to put restrictions in place. We did a full review of all of our operating and strategic expenses and made some significant changes to that. Some easy things to think about, were travel of course, and training. We weren’t going to be getting on an airplane anymore, so we were quickly able to reduce certain costs associated with that. 

We had to review all of our strategic spend and all of the projects that we were doing and recognizing that in some ways, from a virtual perspective, we would have to drop dial those back. And then we spent a significant amount of time looking at various scenarios, and we’ve all heard about the alphabet soup of scenarios, but indeed we did that as well. We defined four scenarios: a “U”; a “protracted U”; a “W”; and “an L”; and we identified timeframes and the actions that we would take in each of those scenarios, so that we had a game plan or a playbook, so to speak, already depending on how this virus and pandemic played itself through. 

And lastly, we did a debt issuance that raised capital for our organization. And that gave us a level of capital to support anything that may happen throughout the balance of 2020. And then lastly, just one other highlight that I’ll put up is that we did do an internal review of the kinds of things that we would need to put in place to manage through the pandemic. And we set up four additional management oversight committees that would focus on capital, on insurance, on governance and on operations. And that structure really allowed us to add a different and more rapid response to key issues that we were facing. If we move ahead to the next slide, which has an awful lot of information on it, so don’t panic, I won’t go through everything that’s on here. But the key things that I wanted to highlight is that we did create a very small set of success criteria for 2020. And for this audience, I wanted to highlight number one, because we said, no matter what happens, The Co-operators remain strong. 

We may have to make adjustments to our projects, we may have to make adjustments to our operating expenses, but who we are as a co-operative and The Co-operators itself remains very, very strong. And as I said earlier, the safety of our employees and our communities were really, really critical. Out of that set of success criteria, we created a set of measures that we would utilize within our broad operations, and those are just highlighted on the screen. But I had touched on a number of them before capital strength, ensuring that we met all of the promises to our clients, that we maintain profitable operations, that we focus on our distribution network and our advisors. And lastly, ensuring that our members and our board remained current with what was going on, particularly during all of these volatile times. The last slide that she’ll put up, Steve, really talks about where things sit right now. 

We are now, April, May, June, July, August, September, seven months into this, the situation that we are. And a couple of things that I’ll highlight, obviously our capital remained strong. That was a key driver throughout this process. Obviously as the CFO, that was one of my critical mandate. And the capital raise that I mentioned earlier was acute component of that. We recast, as I said, our strategic priorities, but those that we kept in place continue to advance and are moving on schedule. Our business units exist and continue to exist to meet our client needs, and that’s been really, really important. But over the last several weeks, we have began reopen all of our advisor offices. They are being done by appointment only, again to maintain the safety of our advisor group, as well as the communities in which they operate. But that is working very, very well. 

We’ve just started last week, our first corporate office reopening, in one of our smaller centers within Canada, but one that has a very good track record from a broad community perspective in terms of the health situation. We’re going to treat that as a pilot, see what we learn from that and utilize that to continue to advance other corporate offices reopening. And throughout all of this, we have ensured that our staff, our advisors, our members, and our board remain highly engaged. We set up a number of different forms from regular updates from our CEO, whether in written form or through video form. 

We’ve had multiple meetings with our board, not from our regular schedule, but from new ones, as well as written updates to them. And we’ve kept our members informed of everything that’s happening. And in fact, in a few weeks, we have a special meeting to continue to inform them of various things that have been going on, how results are, et cetera. So pleased with our response. We had a series of rating agency meetings last week, and for me, it’s one of our great successes through 2020 in terms of how we’ve responded to this really unprecedented series of experiences that we’ve had through 2020. I’ll pause there Steve, and let Warren have an opportunity to talk about Securian. 

Steve Leicester: 

Thank you Karen. Warren, maybe to you. Perhaps before we speak about COVID, perhaps you’d like to share your experiences of working with A4S and a value to you as a CFO and the sustainable journey that Securian are currently on. 

Warren Zaccaro: 

First of all Steve, I want to thank you and ICMIF for the opportunity to be on this panel. And this is the second panel I’ve shared with Jessica since being part of A4S, and she always does a great job of talking about all the benefits that A4S has and ICMIF’s members. Hopefully I can fill in exactly on how my journey has been. And then to Karen, Co-operative has really been a guiding light to me and to the Securian, that we’ve gone on our journey several years ahead of us. But I look at Karen as kind of a big sister in this journey and her predecessor Bruce West was kind of a big brother as we’ve gone on this journey. 

Our first or my first exposure to A4S was when Sean and Steve from ICMIF sent me an invite to dinner with his Royal Highness and members of the European Chapter of A4S and some potential US chapter members. And so the first thing I did was call Sean to make sure it wasn’t some type of cyber phishing attack. And then the second thing I did was really a lot of research and reading and understanding about this very elusive term of sustainability and preparing myself for dinner. But what I learned at dinner was a couple of takeaways. First of all, that A4S had done a lot of outstanding accomplishments already. Their members had a lot of initiatives going and things they could point to. And importantly though, it was really being driven by the finance and the CFOs in organizations, and that was very exciting to me. 

The other thing I learned that at there, I only insurance person in attendance, and I received a challenge from his Royal Highness that the insurance sector should take a stronger leadership position on climate change, and I’ll follow up on that, a minute too. After dinner, I spend some more time with Steve and Shaun, and then Shaun brought The Co-operators in [inaudible 00:36:15] to me at breakfast and talked all about their integrator report and all the great things they were doing [inaudible 00:36:21]. That my interest in learning about their journey and how I could leverage that, what I learned and what A4S could bring in my company, and more broadly, really in the industry, in the US. 

Securian had not began our journey at that time. We had a lot of conversations going on with a few things going on here and there, but perhaps not as much cohesiveness or structure to it. As I reported on the dinner, joining A4S, I believe there were really three key connection points that I could have. And that was to share the message and then both internally within the life and the insurance industry and my peers in the US and then connect with A4S in the US and talk about what the insurance sector and Securian could do. I will give you a little brief comment on each one of those sections as we’ve gone through our journey. First of all, internally, it was very important for me to talk about the breadth of what others were doing in different industries and in the insurance sector around the world and how we can start the initiative at Securian, and the assistance and the [inaudible 00:37:39] and the structure that A4S could bring was really important also. 

People really internally connected to all the messages, to the mission, and the connection that you’ve talked about Steve and that’s to being a mutual in the long-term view. I was able to get my leadership team very connected with some of the different education opportunities that A4S provided in the essential guides, and that’s proved to be very beneficial. Really interesting to me was the internal reaction that we got that the finance was not only taking an interest in all of this, but a leadership position. And I think that was a real win that A4S is focused on finance. So what did we do? Well, we had some brainstorming sessions with leadership in the organization and our associates. We utilized our brand consultant to come in and actually do a working session with not only some of our executive leadership, but with also with associates throughout the organization, to see how we could make this all work for us. 

I’m going to share with you something that the partner from our brand consultant, [inaudible 00:38:57] we were having a working seminar with him and his team, and that was his comment, that I can tell that you all are serious about this as an organization, a particular note, we have not only your controller and your treasurer, but we also have your CFO in this meeting, including an [inaudible 00:39:18], and that gives you a leg up on sustainability if you are finance involved already. Our consultant delivered the findings and a framework and how we should move forward. And we just didn’t want it to end there. Well, things got really interesting and really engaged our associates in the organization, is that our community leadership decided to deliver that framework to our leadership excellence program. It’s about 16 high potential associates in the organization that were tasked with solving and providing an opportunity through group development for the framework. 

And that was really the key to us, is that grassroots associates, totally executive leadership, that this is really important and how we should go about things. They designed a three-year corporate social responsibility roadmap. They did an amazing job. We had great outcomes, momentum, and then leadership development for that team. Right now we have focused our CSR efforts on four key areas, philanthropy, diversity and inclusion, sustainability, and ESG. And we have developed a timetable and a process for going through and signing the net zero statement of support, and I signed that in July. We’ve also developed a timeline for investigating and signing the principles for responsible investing. 

Really strong outcome there and great momentum. From the internally, we really made it fit, what works for our organization. We kept the overall balance in minds [inaudible 00:41:08], and then we did the right thing that finance can do and how they can contribute. It’s about not making everything, as I think, you heard from Karen about the absolute value payback over the short period of time. It’s really searching for what those returns will be, whether it be from better brand opportunities, whether it be from better associate engagement, all things that you can’t necessarily measure in dollar and cents right away, but we as CFOs know what contribute to the growth of the organization. And that’s really the support that I’ve tried to bring internally and with my team is, moving forward, making connection points, advancing the organization, will pay off in the long run. 

From an industry perspective, one of the first things that I did was to get sustainability or ESG investing on the agenda for the significant industry conference for life insurance, chief investment officers, and chief financial officers. And I was able to secure Bruce West, Karen’s predecessor, to be a panelist on that, delivering a very strong message on what Co-operative had done and what others could. Really, got reactions from the industry, a high degree of interest and the tide of ESG responsible investing, it really started to enter in the US. I did what I could to advance things within the life industry and in the US. Although I will tell you, consistent with a lot of things in the US life industry, it’s very fragmented, but we continue the education in the industry. 

One thing that I’m very excited about in the US and globally, and I mentioned earlier on, is every time that I have the opportunity to hear from his Royal Highness, he’s putting emphasis on what role and impact the insurance sector, particularly the property and casualty sector, can do from supporting communities and prepare in dealing with the effects of climate change. And that’s exactly a challenge that he threw down to us in July video conference that we had, and Jessica and her team is actually getting a group of us together, in the next month, to talk about that and what we can do to advance and meet that challenge. 

And then lastly, the A4S involvement in the US with our chapter. And I think it’s been really important for me to represent the insurance industry both in the US and globally with that group. Obviously, there’s a lot of significant companies that issue a debt that insurance companies buy and hold in their portfolios. I mentioned that I was on a panel with Jessica last year, and one of the things that Jessica said to me was, “As you introduce yourself, talk about the insurance sector worldwide. Give us some big numbers. Talk about the catastrophes event. Talk about the amount of investments that the insurance sector does globally.” not only was I able to do that for the insurance sector in total, but I think it was really important to talk about how much of that ICMIF and their membership makes up, and how strong this connection is. 

It was very interesting to bring that perspective to the rest of the US chapter members, to hear from them about the fact that we should be buying more of the green bonds and other things, because how great they are and all the good things they’re doing. And they really laid down the challenge for that, that the insurance industry really needed to get down and support buying those type of bonds, which ends up supporting their efforts towards sustainability. And I have a recap of the things that we’ve done, but what’s been super important for me and for Securian is the connection with A4S and the things that Jessica and her staff, and Karen and her team have been very open to talking to us about anything they’ve done along their journey. I appreciate that. With that, Steve, I’ll turn it back over to you, or I go right into what we’ve done from a COVID perspective. 

Steve Leicester: 

No, that’s excellent. It doesn’t surprise me, you’ve had a great relationship with A4S. Just as with current really, it’d be interesting to see how COVID has impacted Securian Financial and what you’re doing in respect to that. 

Warren Zaccaro: 

Will do. And Jessica, maybe want to advance two slides. If you go back one, please. What we’ve done from a COVID-19 perspective. Not wanting to say that prior to this crisis, we knew exactly what was going to happen, and we were absolutely a hundred percent prepared. But I felt like prior to the crisis, we had a good understanding, a pretty good understanding what could happen in a pandemic. We service and provide insurance and retirement benefits to about 21 million people in the US and Canada, so for us, mortality related events are really a significant thing. And if you go back 10 or 15 years, we did a lot of monitoring, we did a lot of planning, we did a lot of understanding around size and things of that nature. 

We felt we had a fairly good understanding of what we would experience. And I think importantly, we learned we didn’t know everything. But two things that really surprised us are, how quick the shutdown was and the economic impact. And then secondly, early on here, a slow resulting insured deaths were, it wasn’t hitting the insured population right away. A little bit different than we modeled. What was important to us was really a crisis management principles. It’s all of the decisions that you have to make in the crisis. We need clarity and simplicity, and I think Karen touched on a number of these, but as you can see on the slide, the first and most important thing was to take care of the people who count on us. Whether it’s our insureds, our associates, the community we are in, and then to protect our financial strength at the same time. 

We’ve been around for 140 years, we’ve been through 1918, we’ve been through world wars, we’ve been through the Great Recession. We should be building on that. We built our capital not for one year of sales or earnings, we built it for 140 years of financial strength. And continuing on that journey was extremely important to us. And then, early on, we embraced that we needed to remain relevant and we needed to thrive, so that preparing for the future really became a guiding light to us. Plus it was all set against the backdrop of that highly uncertain environment, with a lot of things on the slide, but I think everyone is familiar with. And that was just that we knew customer demands out there to engage with them differently. Our balance sheet remains and remained very strong throughout this. We have tripled [inaudible 00:48:54] capital. 

We would say we have purchased liquidity. And really we spent a lot of time engaging with all of our risk management groups early on. Our finance risk committee swung into action immediately. We went right into our business continuity mode on this. We actually have 95% of our associates working from home since March, in response to the orders. And overnight, it seemed like we went from minimal remote connections to basically the whole organization connecting remotely. I think Karen ended action on this, but one thing we learned from 2008 was communicate, communicate, communicate, whether it be in town halls, whether it be in communication with your clients and things of that nature, or with your regulators or rating agencies, and we do that over and over and over. As we are planning for coming out of the crisis, the next slide, if you could, Jessica, we are accelerating really in three areas of our strategic plan in response to COVID-19. 

And that is first of all, to transform our digital engagement, to enhance the customer experience. And for us that really happens on two sides, our group benefits enrolments, and making that easier, making that state of the art, providing more digital tools, artificial intelligence, and data analytics. And also our individual life insurance side that we’ve watched a number of things since the pandemic began. It’s been important for us to really, to prioritize our efforts in this area. We like a lot of other companies prior to the pandemic had a number of things going on in the organization. And one thing we learned early on is if you focus on two or three things, you can really gain some momentum. We also wanted to simplify our product portfolio. We have a lot of administrative platforms, I think a lot of insurance companies. 

Sometimes I’m amazed at the amount of platforms that we’ve built over the years. And so accelerating that to make things just simpler for people to do, easier to communicate with us. And then maybe, lastly, re-imagining the way we work and how we’re going to do that remotely. And obviously that’s going to help us with our sustainability journey. But we’re going to invest in new ways of working, new places of working, new models of working, new systems. At the end of the day, we’ve really prioritized on these three main items, improve our customer experience, to improve our associate experience and ultimately really to enhance the communities that we’re working in.  

Steve Leicester: 

Thank you Warren, most comprehensive. Thank you. Jessica, it’s our plan in the future to set up in conjunction with A4S a Circle of Practice with members to help members embed sustainability into strategy and business practices. Would you like to just run through how the circle of practice would work and what our members should be doing? 

Jessica Fries: 

Absolutely Steve, and maybe what I’ll do whilst I talk through it is also just share this, which summarizes, I think the key elements. We run a number of CFO Circles of Practice around the world, either sector or geographically focused. And with ICMIF, and then drawing on all of the fantastic work that Karen and Warren have been talking about, and some of our other members. Really pulling out some of those key insights and the knowledge, but focused on the things that are going to be most useful and relevant from an ICMIF member perspective. Drawing on things like those essential guides, the examples. And what we do is we run workshops, round tables, learning opportunities for teams, so that they can really get involved and think about the kind of actions that they can then implement within your own organizations to take this forward. 

It’s that mix of learning, sharing and action. And I think Steve, over the next six months, the target would be launching this officially next year, in April. But between now, and then lots of opportunities to learn more through upcoming webinars, focused on different topics and events. If anyone is interested to get involved with the ICMIF team. I’m sure Karen and Warren and teams are happy to share insights as we move forward. I don’t know, Karen, Warren, whether you had any final comments from that perspective before Steve, you might need to be wrapping up. 

Karen Higgins: 

I just echo Jessica’s comment, but if any ICMIF member is interested in what The Co-operators has done, please feel free to reach out to me, and I’m happy to have a conversation. 

Warren Zaccaro: 

I would say the same thing, happy to connect. Obviously we’re new in our journey and to the extent you want a little bit more detail on how we got things going and what we see as the importance and really leveraging it throughout our organization, happy to connect also. 

Steve Leicester: 

Thank you. And Jessica, if our members want to access those essential guides, they can get them from your website? 

Jessica Fries: 

Yeah, absolutely. All of our materials are on our website, and that’s just showing on the screen now, accountingforsustainability.org. And we have a knowledge hub where there’s all of those case studies, lots of videos as well if anyone prefers, well bite-size content, the worked example that Karen talked through our mental health and social and human capital accounting, and a wealth of other materials. And also you can do things like sign up to our newsletter there, to hear and get access to the latest content that we are sharing all of the time. 

Steve Leicester: 

Excellent. I mean, those essential guide are well-worth looking now, I recommend those to our members. We’re almost out of time. I’d like to thank our panel again. We really appreciate your time and insight today. Finally, we do have three more webinars in the series, tomorrow at 10 o’clock UK time, green bonds and why organizations should invest in them. And then at two o’clock in the afternoon, UK time, joining the investment portfolio and why it’s important, we all play a role in achieving our Paris commitments. Before our final webinar on Wednesday at one o’clock UK time, using the SDGs in business strategy for mutual value creation. Thank you everybody for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. Until tomorrow, goodbye and stay safe. 

The above text has been produced by machine transcription from the webinar recording. ICMIF has made every effort to ensure that transcriptions are as accurate as possible, however, in some cases some text may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. Listening to or watching the webinar recording will allow you to hear the full text as delivered during the webinar but this is available in English only. Our transcriptions are provided to enable members to select the language of their choosing using the dropdown menu above.