Glenn Croasdale: 

Welcome, everybody. We’re looking forward to the next, I think, 40-odd minutes to share FMG’s digital journey. As been alluded to, I’m a newly appointed chief client officer, up until this point having been chief marketing officer, and as we’ll talk through the presentation have been involved in leading our digital client capability over the last five or so years. I’ll pass to Nick to introduce himself now. 

Nick Bennetts: 

Thanks, Glenn. Nick Bennetts, business information services strategy manager with FMG. Worked with Glen on our digital journey on FMG Connect a few years back, so exciting to bring this story to you today. 

By way of agenda, we’re looking to cover a little bit about who FMG is and what’s important to us. That provides a decent backdrop for why we started on FMG Connect and the functionality we chose to introduce. Where we started our digital journey, how we pulled that together and how we look to deliver value for clients. FMG Connect itself, the functionality that was built into that platform and what we’re delivering for our clients. And then around FMG Connect, how we’ve delivered some wider benefits for FMG, and where we’re going next in that digital journey. And then finally, we’re looking to close out with a little bit of progress: how we’re tracking and what’s working well for our clients. 

Glenn Croasdale: 

For those that aren’t familiar with FMG or New Zealand at the bottom of the world, on the right-hand side is a map of our country. What you can see with the green dots is a broadly distributed office network where clients can come into our office, but it’s largely provided for our employees who regionally work out in the field, visiting clients and dealing face to face. Then in the four centralized central locations between the north and south island, we have support functions that largely support that distributed workforce. 

On the left-hand side, you see the two core lines of business that FMG operates, being our general insurance, which covers four core market segments. That being farming, growing, commercial businesses focused on provincial and rural New Zealand, lifestyle blocks, which is essentially a hybrid between the residential market and the farming market. In some countries, it’s called small farming lots or something similar. We distribute 31 different products across those four segments, with the bulk predominantly residing in the core rural target market. Life and health is also a complementary product that we distribute. We don’t underwrite or manufacture the product, but we have strategic relationships with two providers: AIA and New Zealand based Fidelity life insurance. 

In respect to the New Zealand market, which I appreciate on a scale compared to many on this call is relatively small, but ours is a case of FMG being a relatively small fish in what is a larger general insurance ocean in New Zealand. As I say, contextually that would be quite on the small scale when it comes to some of the other organizations, being we have around five and a half million people in this country. And of that general insurance market, as you can see top left-hand corner, FMG is the dolphin. Small, nimble, and quick. 5.7% of the market. But the market is heavily dominated by one major insurer, which has four different brands underneath it, and a secondary, which also is clearly market dominant. Those two really do control the bulk of the market, with that largely being the commercial and residential markets. Both of those insurers are large Australian-owned insurers. 

When it comes to the rural insurance market, I guess the coin is flipped and we become the big bull in the paddock, to use a rural analogy. FMG make 50… It’s just actually ticked over with some more recent data, so just over 54% market share. That has grown substantially in the last 10 years, circa 15, 20% growth in the last 10 years. Then a number of our competitors really operate across two core business models, one being distributed brokers and the other being direct more retail-orientated insurers. They take a much more proportion of that overall pie. When it comes to insurance in New Zealand, FMG is very much known as the rural insurer. 

 Then diving a little bit further into FMG, again I’m just waiting, there we go, for the slide. We talk about the core purpose of the mutual having been started 117 years ago… providing a better deal for rural New Zealand. That’s because 117 years ago when farmers were trying to get insurance, what were English tariff companies at the time didn’t fully understand or appreciate the risks of farming in New Zealand at that time and priced it accordingly. It was essentially unaffordable to have rural insurance in New Zealand, so a small bunch of farmers got together and decided they would support each other. They all provided promissory notes, which ultimately never got drawn on and the mutual was able to build up enough capital to allow us to grow and expand over the next century. 

 When it comes to our brand essence, we probably don’t talk about it enough, but we do describe it as an achievement. It’s about taking risks to achieve your goals. We look at risk as a positive thing, and it links very much to an advice-based strategy that I think Nick will touch on in a few seconds. But it is also designed to support our overall vision, which is to help build strong and prosperous rural communities. I’ll pass on to Nick to talk a little bit about the bottom part of this sketch or puzzle. 

Nick Bennetts: 

Brilliant. Thanks, Glen. Talking about the business model, which would be keen to everyone on this call, the mutuality aspect is obviously very important for FMG. As Glen touched on, we deal with general insurance and life and health insurance as well, and we distribute that product through a proprietary model. To get an FMG product or service, you need to deal with an FMG person. It lets us control that experience and make sure we’re delivering excellent service to our clients. 

Moving along to values, FMG is a strong proponent of the service profit chain. Happy employees lead to happy clients, and happy clients lead to a happy mutual. And then backing that up are the values that go with it. The values are lived every day and they help drive decision-making across the mutual. Those values of doing what’s right, in it together, being proud of who we are, and making it happen. 

Then around positioning, what’s critically important for us is that customer intimacy and relationship management, which we’ll go into a little bit further in a second. Then linked to the insurance aspect is providing advice to our clients. Having a wealth of insurance data means we can analyze that data and give advice back to our clients on how we can mitigate risk and avoid the disruption that comes with a claim. 

When we look at relationships, that’s where FMG is looking to win the game. If we consider the graphic on the left-hand side, we’ve got three dimensions: client intimacy at the top, or relationships, efficiency down on the left-hand side, and innovation on the other axis. You’ll see on the little dots on the screen there, for us intimacy is right at the top there. That’s where we are looking to win and deliver value to our clients while remaining competitive on sales and service, and also innovating on products. Deliver value for our members. 

There’s a nice quote on the right-hand side there from a book called Customer Centricity, which shows the value of actually winning with clients is having that unrivalled intimacy and making sure that every part of the business works together to deliver those outcomes. And heading back to Glen to talk a little bit about where we started our digital journey. 

Glenn Croasdale: 

Yeah, thanks, Nick. I’ll take us back to circa 2016. The context in the New Zealand market was banks had been providing digital capabilities for clients to self-serve for a good 15 plus, maybe 20 years at that point in time. The insurance industry had essentially avoided that and continued with the traditional phone, face-to-face and office model. However, it was becoming more and more obvious that consumers were starting to be influenced by these alternative services and industries. The likes of Netflix and others were starting to become more prominent in the market, and consumers were starting to make noise about why I can’t just do this, why I don’t have access to this information sort of thing. 

That started to agitate a number of us in the business. The approach we took was we felt our traditional model wasn’t going to allow us to build a digital capability whilst continuing to run the business the way we’d always done it, and we thought we might need to do something different. This was at a time when, I guess, the idea of incubators, or digi labs, or whatever other name you have, were becoming quite popular. And so, we took the approach of trying to convince the executive team at the time that we needed to do something different. We had to build a burning platform and we needed the help of some core people from across the mutual to ensure we took an enterprise view around those digital needs. 

We got that support and took 12 people, all largely senior people in the business, out of the business for a two-week period. We were given the scope and the mandate to come back with a strategy as to how we would invest and develop our digital capability. Nick and myself started out with our CIO at the time, and we involved a guy that had been heavily invested in the banking digital transformation 15-plus years earlier. 

Beyond that, we really didn’t know what we were doing or where we were going to go, but that in itself was a real learning experience. What it showed us was the value of bringing a lot of good minds together through the course of the first couple of days of awkwardness, we started to build out a plan and a strategy for how FMG should develop a digital capability for ourselves and why it was unique to us. 

What you can see on the slide is, at a very high level, one of the key outputs that came from that strategy and one that, recently reflecting on within our executive team, we’re very happy we did. Because it’s not just supported the efficiencies within our business to date, but it actually has prepared us very well for a competitive advantage as we come towards the later stages of our digital journey. To explain that, on the graph, I guess, what you can see is down at the bottom you can see relatively simple service and acquisition needs. Thinking in the context of house, car contents type insurances. 

Then at the top of the grid, you will see where more of our complex relationships lie. They’re traditionally in the rural space where they have more product holdings and more risk, but also in some of our commercial areas too. The path we chose to set, which was very different from what was going on in the New Zealand market at the time, was to build the capability for our clients to self-serve before we tried to build a digital acquisition capability to scale for growth. The reason we did that was, as a mutual we thought the thing that was right for us was to enable and empower our clients to do more themselves and to give them transparency and visibility of their insurance, rather than necessarily purely chasing the acquisition dollar. 

On top of that, we were starting fresh without a lot of built-in capability internally, so it made sense for us and it was safer to start in low-risk areas. The likes of house, car contents. Simple products, but then we overlaid that with our service of existing clients as a mutual benefit, and that led us down that path. 

 We started in the bottom left-hand corner. We’ve progressed up to the top left-hand corner where we now offer all products from a visibility perspective through our digital channel called FMG Connect, and we’re continuing to expand out the ability for them to add claim and edit those items as well. They can also pay and do a bunch of other things that we’ll touch on later. 

If I jump to the next slide then, what you’ll see is our intent is to transition back down to box three, which is new simple as the next stage in our journey, which is building out a capability for our clients. For people new to the mutual to join us purely digitally. Today, as Nick described, they need to do that through a person, and that is either over the phone or face to face on-site or in an office. But as I spoke to about some of these changing expectations and consumer behaviours, we do anticipate and are seeing all of our competitors have become digital in terms of their acquisition capability. Many are still well behind when it comes to then allowing their clients to self-serve. As we transition and build out our digital capability, that means we are very well prepared for that pure digital experience. Once they join the mutual, they will then have all of the built-in capability that we have developed over the last five or so years. 

That future state for us is the top right-hand corner, where more complex products will also be available for acquisition to support growing our rural and commercial portfolios as well. In saying that, we don’t anticipate that necessarily all products will be digitized because we’ll touch on it a little bit later in the presentation, but we see digital as being a complementary offering or service to our business model. We’re not trying to become a digital-led insurer. Nick, we’ll jump to the next slide if we can. 

Nick Bennetts: 

Great. Thanks, Glenn. And touching on this one here, this is the value proposition for online for a client from their perspective. Where we landed was, some nice alliteration there, around choice, convenience, and control. Like Glen touched on, there are different channels that we can use to engage with our clients. Whether it’s a phone-based, whether it’s face to face, someone visiting on farm and walking the farm to identify risks and help the clients with advice, or more latterly through the online channel. So, giving clients a choice. 

Convenience. Our current constraint with our existing model is that our service centres, our phone-based teams, are available until six o’clock New Zealand time. Outside of those hours the client would’ve to wait to insure an item or to get insurance support. While that largely works for our client base, the benefit with online is it gives them the ability to manage or check their insurances at any time. If they buy a car after six o’clock at night, they can go onto FMG Connect and insure that vehicle. 

Then control. Just giving them control of their insurances. They can see their policies, they understand their covers, and as Glen touched on before as well, they can lodge claims through that platform. Just a nice way of proving to clients the value of that proposition and how it weaves back into our existing service model. 

When we think about that choice, convenience, and control, we do offer those three channels. We’ve got that mobile channel where employees across 31 locations across New Zealand will go out and visit our more complex clients, provide advice, and then we are backing that with centralized service across 350-odd phone-based roles. Those service centres try to manage towards a 95% answer rate. Effectively just saying to our clients, “If you call, we will answer.” Ironically, that creates a little bit of a challenge for FMG Connect, because we’re in some ways competing against ourselves with that service proposition. But it does give clients that choice, convenience, and control. Depending on what they’re trying to achieve, they can pick the channel that’s most appropriate for them. Those less complex interactions, like insuring a vehicle, they could choose to do online, whereas, for those more complex interactions where they may need advice or guidance from FMG, they can opt that mobile channel or the phone-based channel. 

Handing back to Glen to talk about our approach to designing FMG Connect. 

Glenn Croasdale: 

When you think about those principles of choice, convenience, and control, one of the things that we discussed at length that our digital offsite was, when you are building capability for clients to self-serve, you need to give them the confidence that they are going to be able to complete the activity they’re trying to achieve. Which is quite different to how we’d always traditionally built out technology services or enablement capability through projects at FMG. Because we could put a manager at someone’s shoulder to give them more coaching and support. As they were going on, you could provide training manuals and training. 

When it came to building our digital client capability, none of that was a realistic option, and so we felt we had to find a sweet spot in terms of a different style of thinking, and that was design-led thinking. The Venn diagram on the left-hand side touches on, I guess, the three key elements for that to be successful, or what the sweet spot is in terms of the desirability of that feature or functionality. If it’s not valuable to the user or the mutual, then that will make it ineffective in terms of the value to build or to prioritize. Then there’s the reality of the current time. Noting that even since we started our digital journey, some stuff that probably wasn’t possible then is now possible. But those three things combined helped guide us to where the sweet spot was for us in terms of what functionality and what capability to build. 

And we very much, because of this, need to build a capability that clients can confidently use. We pushed ourselves to ensure that it was simple and straightforward. We tried to avoid handoffs or manual forms that then required a person behind the scenes to take care of it because that didn’t derive the value component that we were looking for. 

If you take a look at the three bullet points in the middle, in terms of the design-led approach, what we were looking for was building out that desirable experience, but in a way that provided operational efficiency, which is a core driver for why we have gone down our digital capability path. It’s about as we’ve grown significantly, being able to grow at scale without the same need for growth at a employee head count level. That’s not to say we don’t intend to grow employee headcount, but at the rate we have grown if we kept growing proportionally at that rate, that could be a heavy burden for us. 

The third one was operational effectiveness, so making things as slick as possible. We’ll share a story or two later on in the presentation about some of these experiences that, combining our on and offline worlds, have provided for our clients. 

The principles that we took to our design-led approach were about being design-led. That was to… of design in a very simple and succinct way. Client informed was about ensuring the voice of our client has been included in our design capability, and we’ve regularly, particularly in the early years as we were building out the patents for our digital platform, regularly tested that with our clients and made amends based on some of their feedback, or some of the behaviors we weren’t anticipating would occur based on the designs that we had built. The third one we called mutual focus, which links to the three points above in the Venn diagram on the left hand side. It needed to be of value to our clients and it needed to be of value to the mutual. 

If we jump to the next slide, one of the other outputs from the digital lab or incubator that we had was setting a strategic intent. For us, while it wasn’t a goal, we believed that the way the market had moved, the way consumers had started to behave, it wasn’t unreasonable that if we do this well and if we execute well, 50% of our transactional activity that currently occur through our Guidewire platform facilitated by our employees doing the work, 50% of that could be transferred to our clients to take care of themselves. Which would again give them that choice, the convenience of when they do it, and the control as to what they are doing to their insurance. This slide simply shows some modeling that had been done behind the scenes that broke out where we believed that would occur with a waiting to our residential and lifestyle clients, particularly based on our roadmap yield we’ll share soon, which lends a bit more, particularly in the acquisition space, on the simpler domestic products of house, car contents. 

The next slide is one that I really enjoy sharing, because as we first started building out our digital capability, we were challenged. Where and how do you build that roadmap? The guiding principle for us was the Pareto Principle where 80% of the value comes from 20% of the effort. To figure that out, we took a look at transactional data over a number of years to understand what our clients were doing. The past often being the best predictor of the future. What we learned was, whilst we are a rural insurer, we do have these four core segments, and what we found was by far and away the vast majority of transactional activity on policies was against our domestic products. You can see, we broke that down a little bit further here, but the biggest share was within our vehicle space, but it was a subset of cars, vans, and utes, which are the most common vehicles on our roads. That was followed by house and then domestic contents. 

Then you start to get into a space which is quite associated with our farming and also lifestyle markets, before you get right down into the bottom corner where there’s some of our commercial offerings, which are much, much smaller. Of those 261,000 policy transactions that were reviewed, 80% of those lay in the top seven products, I think it was. From memory. 

The next slide simply shows some of the policy administration capability inside FMG Connect. If a client logs in today, this is on a desktop view, but it is modular, so it’ll scale for a mobile. They can have a look at the different products they have, and what you can see is in the top left hand corner, they have 13 vehicles and you can see them broken out underneath that. On the right hand side what you can see is a more detailed view of a specific vehicle. It does provide a lot of visibility of the policy. And also, on the right hand side screenshot, you can see some of the things that are available for this particular Lexus to do, so they can edit that vehicle, they can make a claim against it. The policy wording of that particular time and date is linked to that record, and they can also cancel that item as well, should they need to. Or remove it. 

If we jump to the next slide, we will get to the claims modeling that we undertook as well. We looked at policy administration and we looked at claims handling. And again, this exceeded the 80/20 Pareto Principle with 94% of all claims activities occurring across our two main loss types. Now, the loss type being a slightly different definition than the policies. So again, within that you would say there’s probably five to seven policies that would respond to those loss types. That gave us a very clear view where the value lay in terms of building out our digital capability. 

Before we go any further, we’ll jump to the next slide and just give you a view of the claims capability inside FMG Connect. This is one over the last couple of years we’ve really expanded out at an operational level, and in terms of enabling clients to do more with us, has been very beneficial for us. You can see there are approved claims that are being progressed. There’s also one that’s pending where the client can go in and upload documents to support their claim, whether that’s an invoice for a product or repair that’s already been completed, or proof of damage, etc

All right. I’ll hand back to Nick, who will touch on a bit of some of the framework that led towards the roadmap that we are still working towards. Over to you, Nick. 

Nick Bennetts: 

Brilliant. Thanks Glenn. Yeah. Like Glenn touched on, there’s a bunch of functionality that’s been delivered through FMG Connect. When we considered how we invested in delivering that functionality, we broke it into a number of components. As you’ll see on the slide there, there’s four down the side. Leverage, which is those brilliant basics. The policies, the functionality we need to invest in to make sure our clients can do those heavy transactions that they deal with. Extending. From our perspective, it’s how we can make sure that clients get that advice across the platform as well, and how they recognize if there’s any gaps in cover, which also links to upsell or cross sell opportunities. And as you’ll see by the graphic, that had heavy investment from 2019 and then tapers off through to 2025. 

Then what we’re starting to lean into at the moment is the accelerate and deepen phases. Accelerator’s moving into that online acquisition, how we can allow clients to join the mutual and start their first policy with FMG. And then deepen, like we touched on earlier in this presentation, that intimacy. All those relationships is very important to FMG. How do we leverage FMG Connect to help extend and build on those long-term relationships we create with our clients? Those two areas we’ll continue investment through to 2025 while we still extend functionality in that leverage and extend phases. 

Touch here a little bit on the wider organizational benefits that FMG Connect has delivered for FMG. Prior to embarking on this digital experience, we had a few cloud-based technologies, but we didn’t have a great footprint in that world. Delivering FMG Connect allowed us to understand a lot more about cloud, the benefits, some of the pitfalls, and also how you work in that world. It created a bit of a bridgehead for us. 

And then pleasingly, on the back of that work done with FMG Connect, we’ve been consciously transitioning our cloud assets… sorry, our technology assets to the cloud, and that’s occurred over the last three years. Over the coming weeks, we’re about to move our Guidewire platform into Azure as infrastructure service, which completes the transition of all of our technology assets to the cloud. Great to be in that cloud world and making sure that we’re then optimizing those platforms to deliver a good experience for both employees and clients, and reducing some of those expenses as well. 

Then the next bit on the back of that is the competencies that come with being in that cloud world, whether it’s integration engineers, whether it’s cloud engineers, whether it’s front-end developers. But the scale of that platform and moving other solutions to the cloud has allowed FMG to invest in those competencies. 

Then the great thing is, using those competencies, we can deliver more value, and one of the ways we’re looking to do that is introducing an employee portal. Effectively, that’s going to use a similar technology to FMG Connect, which is focused on our clients, but delivering that same sort of experience for our employees, largely our mobile employees as our phone-based roles can work directly in our systems. 

The great thing with that employee portal is we leverage those internal competencies. If we’re delivering functionality that’s beneficial for employees through the portal, then we could choose to replicate that functionality and FMG Connect for our clients, or vice versa. If there’s something we’re delivering in FMG Connect that’s valuable for clients, then we can reuse that in our portal for our employees at the same time. 

Conscious this is a very busy slide, so I won’t talk to it in great detail. But effectively what it tries to represent is a client journey from left or right. When the client chooses to interact with FMG, whether that’s been proactively prompted, or whether they’ve chosen to initiate their interaction, how it moves through the various channels through the FMG Connect phone based on mobile, and then how it ends up with one of our employees. But the interesting point to talk to, and we’ve touched on this a couple of times in the presentation, is the growth in FMG Connect, or FMG Online as it is in this slide. Those green bars will continue to grow in volume, which reduces workload for our phone-based roles. The great opportunity for FMG Connect… sorry, for FMG Via is that we can use those phone-based roles to deliver more value for clients. When they call us, we don’t need to rush to answer the next call, we can spend more time with the client, understanding what they’re trying to achieve and delivering more value, and providing advice on top of that as well. 

Then moving through to the end of it around the omnichannel experience. At the moment we have a multichannel approach, which doesn’t have strong integrations. As we continue to build our FMG Connect and invest in our phone-based technologies, the idea is we can integrate those technologies to deliver that multichannel… sorry, that omnichannel experience. If a client does prompt an interaction in one particular channel, if we choose FMG Connect, then they can escalate that to a phone-based channel and we’ll pass that context along with the call to the consultant to deliver that seamless experience. Handing back to Glen now to talk about a few metrics. 

Glenn Croasdale: 

Yeah. As Nick alluded in the agenda, we thought we’d share some of the performance outcomes so far for FMG Connect. I guess these touch on only a small point of the picture, because I guess the key thing behind these numbers is the trajectory that they’ve grown from. For context, back at the end of 2017 when, I believe, our first feature released, which was just vehicles to a subset of clients that only owned vehicles, was delivered, we had about 2,500 registered users. And rapidly, particularly over the last 12 to 18 months, the amount of our clients or accounts that are now registered, has grown significantly. 43% of all clients have registered, and we do have a very clear and consistent growth trajectory. 

Also, when we actively reach out to our clients to promote and encourage FNG Connect registration, we always see a bump. That’s been consistent for a few years now. Clients are becoming more comfortable and confident with it. And we see that with the amount of monthly repeat login. So it’s exceeding what we originally set as our expectation for logins. We’ve got 30% repeat logins, which shows good interaction, and we see that typically coming through the claims space where often people will look either for an update or to progress a claim, as I spoke to earlier, with things like document upload. 

And that’s actually been extremely beneficial in the last year when we have had a number of significant weather events occur, which have put pressure on our claims team. What we’ve found is, with nearly 20%, or in some months just over 20% of claims coming through our digital channel, that takes a bit of a burden off a team that’s already under pressure. They’ve particularly found that very helpful as well. 

Then in terms of policy transactions, again, this is growing year on year. Circa 40 to 50%, so it’s really positive to see. About 12% of all transactions on a monthly basis occurring through FMG Connect now. What we’re seeing is a lot of activity that is driven by the renewal process starting to become quite normalized in terms of the renewal being the trigger and then FMG Connect being the next enabler. Sometimes that leads onto a phone call or a site visit as well, which supports that complementary approach that we take with our digital channel. 

Nick, I’ll let you touch on how we measure our client advocacy. 

Nick Bennetts: 

Brilliant. Thanks Glenn. Around NPS, FMG has been on this journey for the last 10 years or so. 10 years ago, we had a plus 10% NPS and that’s moved through to 60% today. The key thing there is the golden rule: treat people like you want to be treated yourself. Then underpinning that there’s four key behaviours that we try to focus on through our different channels: humour, empathy, effort reduction, and managing expectations. A couple of those are pretty key. We’re all people, so delivering a bit of humour for clients where appropriate, or in claims situations delivering empathy as well is critically important. 

Then linked to that we get a bunch of verbatims from our clients, and that information is gold. We can understand what’s not working for them and how we can improve those services. A strong focus across NPS for all FMG employees, and particularly our phone based roles understand how important they are to delivering that proposition. 

Then pleasingly, as you’ll see on the graphic there, FMG Connect is currently tracking at a 75% NPS. That’s measured based on the last interaction. When those clients have dealt with FMG Connect, they’re getting that great experience and it’s delivering that fantastic service for them. In time, we’d expect to see that NPS number slowly creeping up, noting it is getting harder to move that dial. 

Glenn’s going to share a nice story about a client that had a great experience through FMG Connect, which highlights that NPS. 

Glenn Croasdale: 

Yeah. There’s two very quick stories that I’ll share, and I guess they relate to the concept of we’re not trying to become a digital insurer. We’re trying to provide a digital capability that’s complementary to what we do, and being very, very customer centric at the core of what we do. One of the first things we did when we started building at our digital capability, working very closely with our chief claims officer, was build strong relationships right through our insurance value chain, particularly with our suppliers. We amended some service level agreements and some specific relationships with clients to support what we knew would be a coming capability that digital would enable. 

Probably the best client experience that we’ve heard of to date is a situation where a client damaged their phone. They used FMG Connect to lodge that claim and then happened to head down to the mall, their local mall. While they were there, they had a phone call, clearly on the partner’s… or the cell phone number that they’d been given, from our supplier well within the service level agreement, which is a response within one hour. They just happened to be close enough that they were encouraged to walk into that store, and when they did, they were essentially… The claim had been pre-approved because it met certain criteria, which meant it had been handed over to our electronics partner who had then contacted the client. Because the client was at the mall, they were able to walk in and pick up a brand new cell phone within under an hour. From a client experience, that client was just stumped that that interruption, you know how personal everyone takes having their cell phone, or the fear of losing their cell phone these days; they were just over the moon by that. And FMG was pretty happy too, because the human involvement in that process from FMG’s side was zero. That was about as efficient as we could make that process for us. 

The second one is similar in experience. A client had a damaged windscreen from a stone hitting it. They used FMG Connect to lodge the claim. That was approved, because it met the right criteria, and then it was passed on to our service provider who’s the windscreen repairer in this situation. That windscreen repairer was able to book them in within 17 hours and have that windscreen replaced and the vehicle returned to the client. So again, they were over the moon in terms of the overall experience, and again, FMG’s involvement in that from a human effort perspective was zero. 

Those are two of the best experiences, but we have many that fit in a similar construct or story structure. However, the time differences is comparable, but those were the fastest turnarounds we’ve seen so far. 

I think that brings us to lessons learned along the way. There are two that probably stand out most for us. One is, as we embarked on building our digital capability and doing things differently, we had a blank sheet of paper to start with. It was very easy to innovate and do things differently. Now, to be fair, we did have to worry about client data. That was always a challenge, because we chose to start with servicing existing clients first. But apart from that, we felt freed and liberated from some of the challenges and complexities of the core system and the bigger business. Because we were starting at that time with just building out a digital journey. 

What we learned, though, is as you reconnect, as digital becomes a channel in and of itself, you need to start to consider the broader organizational needs and impacts. The product changes that will occur on an annual basis, the pricing changes; the other complexities that exist within your business operation that you now need to overlay through your digital channel. And so, whilst being agile and nimble seemed easier in the early days, there was a real learning about the need to ensure you’re bringing enterprise thinking the whole way through that experience. Particularly if you are building out a digital capability for it to be complimentary for your business, as opposed to just building out a digital insurance company that maybe operates under a different brand or is completely discreet. 

Related to that point, because we were building out a digital capability to be complementary to our business model, the importance of bringing our people along on the journey was a real… We did work hard on it, but it was a real learning as to some of the innate fears that employees can carry when they think about digital and digital transformation. Often it’s immediately associated, for certain people in certain roles, with you’re going to do away with my job. And despite a good couple of years of telling people that this is not about cost out in terms of removing head count, albeit it was about driving efficiency and freeing up our people to do more value added activities, that concern still resonated with a number of people for probably a good two or three years. We do seem to have passed that hump now where teams are actually very supportive of it, because they see, one, it hasn’t removed headcount. We’ve chosen not to remove headcount. We repurposed what that headcount is focused on, which is typically client activity and adding more value to our client’s experiences with us through the provision of good advice. 

And so, yeah, by not removing FTE and by seeing the efficiencies that it provides for our people not having to do some of these manual processes, particularly in the claims environment where we deliver these straight through processes, that’s convinced our people that digital is a complementary and valuable addition to our broader overall service model. 

Nick, was there anything you wanted to add in terms of lessons learned there? 

Nick Bennetts: 

No, I think you’ve touched on both of those key lessons there with it as well. I think the great third lesson to add into the mix is probably around opportunities. FMG Connect is a great platform to deliver that choice, convenience, and control for clients, but it does give FMG the opportunity to do things slightly different in the future and make sure we’re well positioned to respond to changes in our market, changes in client demand. So, just great having those options to actually explore in the future, and leverage the technology of FMG Connect. 

Handing back to you, Ben, I think that’s all we wanted to cover from the presentation. Then I understand you have some questions that we can answer as well. 

Ben Telfer: 

Thank you very much, Nick. Thank you, Glenn. An excellent presentation there. We do have a few questions that I’d like to pose on you before we close today. The first question, you mentioned that when you started the FMG Connect journey, you did get the bold buy-in. But did you get any sort of pushback from any of your members, perhaps from a more traditional agricultural background, that you were perhaps losing your USP in terms of that relationship-based service? I mean, perhaps in the ballroom there was some pushback. Was there any of that within your membership, or were you clear in the fact this was a complimentary service rather than replacing what you had done so well for, I guess, 107 years beforehand, if this was 10 years ago when you started this journey? 

Glenn Croasdale: 

Having, I guess, been a traditional service model for a long time, that was a concern that we had about how we approached our stakeholders in the very early days. That point that’s been emphasized many times in this presentation about being complementary, was very deliberate. And we’ve continued for five years to reemphasize that point, just to reinforce now that that is a key part of our channel strategy that has played out to be true. 

With our exec and board, yes, there were probably a little bit of concern early on. But for every concerned individual there was someone at the other end of the spectrum saying we have to do this, and they were being driven by… whether it was businesses that they deal with in other areas or aspects of their lives, or simply service providers that as consumers they interacted with too. 

The old fallacy, particularly around farming, that they are digital laggards or technology adverse, I think is absolutely false. More often than not… Well, we see every dairy farmer in this country is integrated into the internet for monitoring. And there’s GPS tracking and monitoring on fertilization. There’s a massive variety of technology that’s been adopted in rural New Zealand, and I’m sure all around the world. So yeah, I don’t believe that view that rural are laggards when it comes to adoption of technologies. In fact, given the right environment, they can be some of the best users of it. 

Ben Telfer: 

Thank very much, Glenn. I just want to add to that question that was sent in. Was there any, I guess, hesitance from your staff? Because, I mean, you mentioned before that some of their roles are going to be changing. Were people thinking this was a way to replace some of the sales staff or some of the call centre staff? Or was that communicated, what the change was going to be and why it was being done, for the benefit of the organization? 

Nick Bennetts: 

Yeah. And maybe I can touch on that one to start with and Glen can follow with some thoughts as well. As we mentioned in the presentation, one of the key drivers for us was offloading some of that people effort from our phone based roles into FMG Connect through that choice, convenience, and control. And that’ll be the simpler, manual, repetitive tasks where clients can do that themselves. It’s definitely not a people-out strategy, as Glen mentioned as well, but how do we then leverage our employees that have a bit of extra time to add more value to our clients? Being advice and insurance, if we understand or know something about a particular client or segment they’re in, or we can compare them to other clients, how do we provide that advice to let the client make a more informed decision about their insurances, which then leads to a better client experience and leads to a better end use for our member? And Glen, if you wanted to add that one as well. 

Glenn Croasdale: 

Yeah, yeah. I think you’ve summed it up very well. There was some concern, particularly in our service centres, on the phone based roles, where they thought that it would be essentially doing away with their roles. But that’s really evolved over time, and some of them are big proponent of it. The conversations they have with clients now, they then encourage them to jump online and have a look at what they’ve just done for them and express that that’s something they could do themselves next time if they like. But again, it’s about being complementary, so we don’t force them to use a particular channel. We encourage them to know that it’s there. 

When we think about our members, because we started with those smaller products and they were domestic products, it seemed like that worked well in terms of them feeling comfortable that we’re not just getting rid of our people. Because I think the fact that our people go and visit clients is immensely important to them. And they saw us walking the talk. They saw that we’re building a capability that allows them to do more themselves, but we’re not taking things away. 

Ben Telfer: 

Thank you, Glenn. Thank you, Nick. You mentioned before that you use Guidewire, that platform. Was there any reasons that you chose Guidewire over other service providers? Because I think you mentioned before that you’re moving to the cloud with Azure as well. So is there any reasons why it stood out based on your needs? 

Nick Bennetts: 

Yeah, so maybe I can kick off of with that one as well. We’ve been on Guidewire for a long while. We started investigating the platform in 2012, I believe it was, and went live with our first module policy centre into a 2013 and then claims centre in 2015 as well. The great thing with Guidewire is it’s a best-of-breed technology and a market leader. It delivers the capabilities we need for our insurance platforms and lets us integrate some of those other services into it to deliver a great experience for employees and clients. So we’re very happy with the Guidewire products here. And if you wanted to add anything to that answer as well, Glen. 

Glenn Croasdale: 

No, I think you’ve nailed it there, Nick. 

Ben Telfer: 

Perfect. Thank you, Nick. I think we’ve got time for just a couple more questions. This one, I do like this one. You mentioned how digital was… it’s the title of this webinar, how digital was complementing the FMG distribution and client engagement model. Do you ever sense how that may change in the next 10, 15, 20 years? Could it be something more than just complementing? I think you touched on this briefly, but looking further into the future. 

Glenn Croasdale: 

Do you want to go first, Nick, or do you want me to? 

Nick Bennetts: 

You start with that one. I’ll chip in at the end of it. 

Glenn Croasdale: 

It’s funny. We’ve only recently had a couple of conversations about what the world can look like in 10 or 20 years’ time. I’m a big proponent of… I think it was Bill Gates that was quoted with people overestimate how much change will happen in the next two years, and they underestimate how much change will happen in the next 10. As I say, a big proponent of that. I reckon the next two years won’t look drastically different from what it does today. In reality, I don’t think… We’ll have more electric vehicles on the roads, but we won’t have flying vehicles as a common capability. Albeit, there is about a hundred different prototypes for those things around. 

10, 20 years out, now I think driverless cars could be a much more common capability on the road. How that transpires into what impact that has on insurance, I think that’s a big question. I think the use of data will be the big game changer over the next 10 or 20 years. I think augmenting that, and potentially even things like voice command. I suspect that, yeah, 10, 20 years’ time the world will look as different to us today as 2020 does to the turn of the century. Probably a bit of a vague answer, but that’s because I don’t have a crystal ball. 

Nick Bennetts: 

And maybe just to add to the back of that one as well, judging by my crypto investments, I also don’t have a crystal ball. But Glen picked on a couple of neat themes there as well, that you just don’t know what’s going to happen next. Even in a technology sense, what was best practice today could be very different next week. But I think the key thing for us at FMG, and for other people in this webinar listening in as well, is building the capabilities and competencies that you’re going to need in the future to allow you to respond to that future state. Some of those foundational competencies or technology abilities lets you pivot or respond to whatever the future may bring. And then it’s just important to stick close to your clients. What’s important to them, what problems are they trying to solve, and how do you deliver those solutions to make sure that you’re remaining relevant for them and delivering that in an exceptional way. 

Ben Telfer:

Brilliant. Thank you so much, Nick. Thank you, Glen, for answering that quite expansive question. I think that’s a great place to wrap up today’s webinar. Nick and Glenn, thank you so much for joining us today and running us through FMG’s case study. As I mentioned at the start of the webinar, this is a series of webinars looking at digitalization and digital transformation. We’re up to episode 13 over the past couple of years. And as an ICMIF member, you have access to all the previous ones that you can watch on demand. You can follow the link on the screen to access these. You will be sent these as well, as well as the recording of today’s webinar, and you can also access any of these episodes via the ICMIF knowledge hub too. 

Just finally, a quick recap there of all the previous webinars that we’ve hosted. Not just this year, but over the past few years. Again, these are all exclusive access for ICMIF members and you can get them via the link on screen, or again, through the ICMIF knowledge hub. Just a final thank you to Nick and Glen for joining us today. Hope everybody’s well and see you on a future ICMIF webinar again very soon. Thank you, everyone. 

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