Southern Cross Travel Insurance (SCTI) has appointed Nathan Barrett (pictured) to the newly created role of chief transformation officer, placing artificial intelligence adoption and enterprise-wide change at the centre of its executive agenda – at a moment when competitive conditions across the Tasman are shifting materially.
Barrett has held contract roles at SCTI since July 2025, first as a consultant on partnerships and market growth, then as interim chief digital officer from January 2026. He moves into the permanent, full-time position this month, with a remit spanning AI adoption, enterprise transformation, and client acquisition across SCTI’s New Zealand and Australian operations.
SCTI chief executive Carole Tokody confirmed the appointment in a company statement. “Nathan has supported the SCTI team since July 2025 in a number of key ways and will now lead our AI adoption, enterprise transformation initiatives, and client acquisition opportunities. He brings extensive leadership experience across technology, operations, and transformation, together with deep expertise spanning product, pricing, underwriting, and claims. We’re delighted he is continuing with SCTI in this expanded role,” Tokody said.
The appointment follows a significant development in the ANZ travel insurance market. In June 2026, Allianz Partners announced it had signed an agreement to acquire a large portion of nib’s Australian and New Zealand travel insurance portfolio – including the Travel Insurance Direct (TID) brand and a 20-year white-label distribution agreement with nib Group – describing the transaction as establishing it as a leading force in the Australian travel insurance market. The deal remains subject to regulatory approval. The transaction marks Allianz Partners’ return to the offline travel distribution channel in Australia, a segment it had stepped back from following the COVID-19 pandemic. For SCTI, which has operated in Australia since 2009, the re-entry of a global competitor with renewed cross-channel ambitions adds commercial weight to its transformation investment.
The pool of potential customers is growing. Statistics New Zealand recorded 3.01 million short-term overseas trips by New Zealand residents in the March 2025 year – a post-pandemic high and a direct measure of the insurable travel base both SCTI and its competitors are competing to reach. Consumer intent is also rising: SCTI’s Future of Travel 2026 report, based on a nationally representative survey of 1,072 New Zealanders conducted in late 2025, found that 88% of respondents now regard travel insurance as a priority for international trips, up from 79% in November 2024. A protection gap persists, however. Independent research commissioned by SCTI found that approximately 19% of New Zealanders travelled overseas without travel insurance in 2025, up from 15% in 2024, with the rate rising to about 26% among 18 to 29-year-olds. Narrowing that gap – converting stated priority into actual purchase — sits directly within the client acquisition element of Barrett’s mandate.
Rising claims costs reinforce the operational case for transformation investment. From January to November 2025, SCTI paid more than $7.3 million across more than 3,350 medical and evacuation claims, averaging $2,181 per claim, with both volume and total payout increasing compared with 2023 and 2024. Managing that trajectory at scale, across two markets and a growing customer base, is a direct operational problem AI adoption is designed to address.
The regulatory environment for doing so is being actively shaped. In a special topic within its May 2025 Financial Stability Report, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) identified AI’s potential benefits to financial institutions – including improved productivity, greater modelling accuracy, enhanced risk assessment, and strengthened cyber resilience – but also warned that errors in AI systems, data privacy concerns, and market distortions could amplify existing risks. “There is still considerable uncertainty around how AI will shape the financial system,” said Kerry Watt, the RBNZ’s director of financial stability assessment and strategy.
Sector-wide adoption is accelerating regardless. According to Gallagher New Zealand’s March 2026 Insurance Market Update, citing the 2025 Gallagher Adoption and Risk Survey, 63% of businesses had either fully operationalised or implemented AI within parts of their operations, a marked increase from 45% in 2024, with the most common applications in IT operations management, client-facing functions, and research and analytics. The same survey found that at least half of businesses identified potential job insecurity as a side effect of AI transformation – a workforce dimension that transformation executives are increasingly expected to manage alongside the technology itself.
What distinguishes this appointment from a conventional technology hire is Barrett’s depth across the insurance value chain. He spent approximately 16 and a half years at Farmers Mutual Group, culminating as chief product & pricing, underwriting & claims officer – a role that included oversight of a claims spend of approximately $220 million per year and external relationships with the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) and the Reserve Bank, according to his LinkedIn profile. He subsequently served as group chief operating officer at Delta Insurance Group, with responsibility for technology, project management, people and culture, and marketing.
That combination – deep underwriting and claims knowledge paired with operational and technology leadership – positions the role differently from a pure digital appointment. The Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance (ANZIIF)-partnered Heartbeat of General Insurance 2025 report, drawing on insights from more than 120 senior industry leaders across Australia and New Zealand, found that 68% of respondents identified technology-driven efficiency as their primary opportunity, while noting that accountability, ethics, and human oversight remain central to how AI-related decisions are made.
Combining AI strategy, enterprise transformation, and client acquisition under one executive – rather than distributing them across separate functions – signals that SCTI is treating transformation as a standing business accountability with commercial outcomes attached.
