Insurers have strengthened their focus on corporate social responsibility, partnerships and mentoring programmes over the past decade, and for many insurers, these programmes have now become an important part of their ongoing strategy.
Insurers discussed the importance of such programmes for cultivating future talent, supporting communities and boosting inclusion at the recent Women in Insurance Summit in Auckland. Commenting on the need for more affordable cover, Resolution Life CEO Thérèse Singleton highlighted one particular product that she feels the insurance industry needs to look at making more widely available, particularly to those who may not otherwise be able to purchase good life cover.
“From a business perspective, one of the things we developed at AMP a few years ago was a very simple and affordable life insurance product for those who were not the breadwinners of the family,” Singleton said.
“It was a very important aspect of what we needed to do, but it’s very hard to make it economically feasible because the product has to be priced very sharply, and you also need to have a big customer base to make it work. But we also used that product as a retention tool for KiwiSaver.”
“I remember ringing customers around and asking them about their experience, and I spoke to the wife of someone who had died,” she explained. “She’d had $100,000 cover with us, and it was the difference between her being able to provide for her boys and keep her family together.
“For this industry, that’s where we need to get to. We need to be able to provide these product for those who need them, and provide them at an affordable level. Technology and digitisation will assist us in doing that, but there just isn't enough innovation quite yet.”
Training and mentoring programmes have also seen a large take-up by insurers in recent years. AIG New Zealand CEO Toni Farrier noted that one of AIG’s key partnerships is with the Graeme Dingle Foundation, which helps bring young women into the insurance sector and equip them with the skills necessary to start a successful career path.
“The Graeme Dingle Foundation is focused primarily on ensuring that young people have some good career opportunities open to them, but also on mentoring them to prepare them to enter the workforce,” Farrier said.
“A lot of these disadvantaged kids don’t have good role models anywhere else, so it’s very much about explaining the industry, but also mentoring them to help build those baseline skills around resilience, problem solving, professionalism, etc.
“It’s a deliberate choice for us to align with that, and it helps us increase the profile both of insurance, and also of our diversity approach.”
Farrier said that when it comes to mentoring, there is still no one approach that works for everyone. She said that her own mentors had always been ‘informal’, but through their support, she found that her career opportunities were boosted significantly, and she was put up for roles that she may not otherwise have thought of going for.
She said the mentoring framework AIG offers now is ‘challenging’ for everyone involved, but when it works, it produces ‘powerful’ results.
“I’ve participated in formal mentoring programmes myself where I’ve been allocated a mentor, but then the connection wasn’t quite right,” Farrier said.
“I’ve found that the most effective mentoring relationships I’ve had have been quite informal, so they’ve been people in the organisations I’ve worked with who have taken a specific interest in my career, talked about what I’d like to do, how I should put myself forward, etc.”
“One of them turned out to be a senior manager at a large insurer, and he was looking for someone to run one of their distribution units,” she continued.
“I didn't even think about it as I was about to go on maternity leave, but he sought me out and said that if I was the right person for the job, then we’ll go through the process and put the right support in place until I came back. That was a deliberate searching out by a senior person who took a real punt on me, but it really boosted my opportunities.”
“The mentoring that we’re doing at the Graeme Dingle foundation is very structured and tends to focus on Māori and Pacific Island women,” Farrier concluded.
“It’s reasonably challenging and puts you through quite a bit of training, and our mentors get trained on how to work with young people and teenagers, and how to go through mentoring sessions with them. That has been really helpful for me and the young people that we’ve been working with, so you do need some training if you can’t find some natural mentors.
“Its about investing in those programmes and giving them a try. They won’t always work, but in the cases that they do, they’re very powerful.”
