Insurance talk
Nick Stanhope talks healthy innovation
Sovereign chief executive Nick Stanhope has just celebrated his first anniversary in the job. It’s his first role at the top of an organisation, but he says he is loving the challenge of trying to innovate in an industry selling something most of us hope never to need.
Has there been anything that has surprised you about your first 12 months?
It doesn’t come with a manual, so a lot of it you need to learn quickly. But it also differs depending on the person, your personality and your leadership style.
What are the biggest challenges?
For the first time everything flows to me. Even when I was running the second-largest wealth business in New Zealand at ASB, I was one of many. Now, if anything happens, good or not so good, it’s something I handle, manage and work through with the various stakeholders. You certainly rely on personal resilience. I am an optimist, I focus on what’s possible.
Do you think New Zealanders’ attitudes to insurance are changing?
I think a lot of that is driven by immigration. People who come into New Zealand from other countries where their health systems are different, they don’t have ACC for example, look at the value of health insurance and life insurance quite differently. We see a high proportion of immigrants that will take on life and health insurance.
Having worked in this job for a period of time you get to know the data around what can happen to people. On a personal level, I make sure I’m well insured.
This business is all about data decades and decades of data which tells us what can happen to people and what has happened to people. With technology, one of the things I want to be able to do is enable people to have that information, so they can assess for themselves the likelihood of things happening and do their own risk management.
We all don’t want anything to happen, but we should focus on the positive. But things do happen and what’s the strategy to deal with those circumstances?
I don’t think anyone dwells on the fact they might get sick. We all die, the question is when and what are the circumstances you leave? When something goes wrong it’s too late.
You’re taking more of a wellness approach, rather than being an ‘‘ambulance at the bottom of the cliff’’?
We’ve been trialling Healthy by Sovereign which is a programme that rewards people eating certain types of food. We don’t look at the detail, but if they get whole foods in their supermarket shopping we give them points for that. If they go to the gym... we know a certain degree of activity and dietary direction can make quite a difference to people’s health and wellbeing. We’re just trying to deepen the relationship with our customers. Health information is mutually beneficial because we don’t want people to claim and they don’t want to claim either. If we can help them it’s a win/win.
When you start to understand the good [insurers] do in the New Zealand economy and for New Zealand Inc - $350m a year goes into the economy to help people in their time of need. It’s not just the money, I go out in my visits and see claimants and how we’ve turned someone who’s been in their deepest, darkest moment to where they’ve come to - happy and back in employment.
What a fantastic thing to be involved in.
I don't think anyone dwells on the fact they might get sick. We all die, the question is when and what are the circumstances you leave. Nick Stanhope