Sun Life CEO shares digital imaginative and prescient for the longer term

Sun Life has been in enterprise within the conventional life insurance coverage trade for over 150 years, and cultural shifts accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic affect have made digital mission important for the insurance coverage firm.

Sun Life purchasers now count on to have “fully digital journeys” with the life insurer, which additionally focuses on wealth and well being options, and it is a world phenomenon, Sun Life president and CEO Kevin Strain (pictured) instructed Insurance Business.

“Our businesses are fully digitally oriented, and we’ve been stressing culturally that we have to think and act more like a digital company,” Strain stated. “We have to be more agile, we have to push decision making closer to the client, and it’s a significant shift in how we think about doing business.”

Strain’s emphasis on this transformation is backed up by the life insurer’s 2022 annual report, by which ‘digital’ or ‘digitally’ are talked about 60 instances. Among celebrated milestones, greater than 65,000 monetary roadmaps had been created for Canadians utilizing the Sun Life One Plan digital software final 12 months, whereas in Asia 83% of functions had been made digitally, consultant of a 12% surge.

“In my mind, the life insurer of the future is a digital business that meets clients’ needs how they need to be met, and how they want them to be met,” Strain stated.

Digital drive pivotal to Sun Life’s triple-pronged well being, wealth, and insurance coverage lifetime goals

Strain sees this digital drive as taking part in a pivotal function because the enterprise builds out its capabilities to satisfy its imaginative and prescient of “helping clients achieve lifetime security and to live healthier lives”, with a larger give attention to well being and wellness than previously and on delivering plans that embody evolving life, well being, and wealth wants.

“It’s about creating digital ways of interacting with clients that cover life, health and wealth – and that dive much deeper into wellness will certainly change how we look,” Strain stated.

To ship on this and for the group to proceed “demonstrating an impact”, it may possibly now not be seen because the help operate of the previous, based on Strain, and Sun Life, which made CA$4.3 billion in insurance coverage gross sales and had CA$1.33 trillion of property below administration final 12 months, has regarded to a contemporary mindset.

Agility has turn out to be a precedence for the greater than a century-and-a-half previous insurance coverage firm, and items have labored extra carefully with digital groups to share suggestions and concepts.

Hybrid “here to stay”, says Sun Life president and CEO Kevin Strain

This digitally centered strategy has prolonged to how Sun Life is its workforce.

Strain, however, predicted that “hybrid is here to stay”, with some caveats. Sun Life is at present dedicated to hybrid work, with most companies not having mandated days and the group having successfully taken a business-by-business and role-by-role strategy, based on Strain. For instance, its “highly collaborative” asset administration enterprise has requested folks to come back in additional ceaselessly, whereas these engaged on solo initiatives have been coming in much less typically.

“One of the things we do believe is that when people come into the office, they should be coming in for collaboration, they should be coming in for teamwork, or sessions that need that sort of innovation,” Strain stated. “We want to make the office a magnet for people; we want them to come because they get closer to the culture, and they see the value of those relationships.”

Cultural norms and variations are additionally at play, with staff in some areas having been extra inclined to return to pre-pandemic norms.

“If you went to Asia, you’d find that most people are coming back into the office now,” Strain, who served as president of Sun Life Asia from 2012 to 2017 based mostly in Hong Kong, stated. “And that’s been their choice, right? They’ve wanted to come back for lots of different reasons that tie into the culture.”

Sun Life CEO believes advisors are right here for the lengthy haul and can profit from know-how

The means the life insurance coverage brokers and advisors have interacted with purchasers has additionally modified, and Strain additional predicted that hybrid expectations the place it involves doing enterprise are right here to remain.

Digital savviness has turn out to be a key requirement for advisors and brokers, whereas developments and a surge in curiosity in generative AI, buoyed by the meteoric rise of ChatGPT into the sphere of public curiosity, has even seen solutions that they may discover themselves competing with the know-how.

A latest survey of 1,000 American shoppers by life insurance coverage company Getsure discovered that regardless of 68% of respondents anticipating insurance coverage brokers to get replaced by AI inside 20 years, much more (70%) wouldn’t really feel comfy coping with an AI agent – simply 9% stated they’d really feel very comfy doing so.

“Computers can’t have empathy,” Strain stated. “Generative AI is not going to have empathy and the role of the advisor, which is to understand their clients and to empathise with their clients, is so important.”

Clients could also be anticipating options for the computerised age, however advisors and brokers will proceed to play a key function for the long-term and prospects wish to proceed having that long run “digital journey” with them, in Strain’s view.

“The role of the advisor is even more important today than it’s ever been, because of the complexity and the sophistication of bringing together life insurance, health insurance and wealth products, and the fact that that’s being done over a lifetime,” Strain stated.

What’s your tackle Sun Life CEO Kevin Strain’s strategy to digital and imaginative and prescient for the life insurer of the longer term? Let us know within the feedback under.