MANULIFE CEO GUIDING COMPANY’S DIGITAL FUTURE.
Manulife wants to change ways consumers mix
Roy Gori, chief executive of Manulife Financial Inc., says the key to propelling the 134-year-old insurance and asset management company into a digital future is partnerships and strategic investments with innovators outside the walls of the traditional financial institution — and even outside financial services — alongside inhouse tech developments.
“We’ve made investments in several tech startup companies and we’ve partnered with a lot,” Gori said in a recent interview with the Financial Post.
“We don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket. We want to work with hundreds of companies as opposed to working with one company and making it a ‘Hail Mary pass’.”
It’s the type of strategic discussion taking place in executive suites and boardrooms across business sectors, and particularly in financial services, where “disrupters” are keen to siphon business from those who don’t adapt.
For Manulife, the transformation began in earnest in 2018.
“Twenty or 30 years ago, the way a consumer would engage with an insurance company was very manual, very archaic, very paperbased, and quite honestly, over the past few decades, it (hadn’t) really changed much,” Gori said.
“We thought that there would be a tremendous opportunity if we could get on the front foot, and be a leader in changing the way consumers engaged.”
Some of the investments and partnerships have focused on financial services. Last year, for example, Toronto-based Manulife struck a five-year exclusive partnership with Vietnam’s Cong Dong Bau, which operates an online community that has drawn in more than five million new and expectant mothers for access to financial advice and digital tools.
But the insurer and group benefits provider is also reaching beyond financial technology startups, or fintechs, into sectors including health care.
In the fall of 2019, Manulife made an investment in Haodf.com, China’s leading online medical platform, in a deal that also gives Manulife customers access to medical resources in China. A spokesperson said that investment and strategic partnership formed a plank in a “health ecosystem” the Canadian firm plans to offer customers everywhere it operates.
Manulife also partnered with Singapore-based Rewardz, a rewards aggregator, to create a behaviour-linked program to incentivize insurance customers to be more physically active.
The insurer has also teamed up with Apple and Amazon to use their wearable technology products in programs that aim to sway the health behaviour of Manulife policyholders — and ultimately cut costs for the insurer.
“We see a lot of digital startups who are looking to improve or provide technology or solutions (that) can help enable that transformation that we’re talking about,” Gori said.
“We’re dealing with hundreds of companies on a daily basis that are in that ecosystem, and in many cases we’re partnering with them and using their solutions.”
Along the way, Manulife integrated its insurance underwriting tools with Penn sylvania.-based software company ipipeline to speed up the life insurance application process for customers in the United States, and became the first Canadian company to use artificial intelligence to underwrite mortgage creditor insurance.
Gori said the company is also exploring tie-ups with startups that are not yet applying their technology to financial services applications.
“They’re providing solutions to completely different industries, but we see that there’s an application for us in our industry, and we want to leverage them,” he said.
But as the line between tech startups and established financial services players blurs, Manulife isn’t relying solely on outside innovators. Gori said the firm’s digital transformation remains on a dual track.
“We’ve also got a lot of investment going into building our own technical capabilities that can allow us significant advantage as well,” he said.
Manulife has invested $750 million since 2018 to boost its digital capabilities. The digital transformation is among the firm’s top five strategic priorities, measured in part by a closely tracked “net promoter score” that suggests how likely someone is to recommend the company to someone else.
“(Customers and clients) are telling us that they really feel that the experiences have improved quite significantly,” Gori said.
In the Canadian group benefit business alone, paper statements have been reduced by 51 per cent, and there has been an 84 per cent reduction in benefits cheques delivered by mail.
“This is the agenda, to digitize our franchise ... There’s still a lot for us to do in that space and we feel very excited about the opportunity that it continues to represent,” he said.