Danny Wood 00:10:31 Hello and welcome to Insurance Business TV. I’m Danny Wood, news editor of Insurance Business New Zealand. Most conversations about insurance start after something has gone wrong. My guest today argues the industry’s bigger opportunity sits earlier than that, in prevention, education, and the work that stops the loss happening at all. Paula Shepherd-Jones is managing director of Duol New Zealand, and she’s based in Auckland. Hi, Paula.

Paula Shepherd-Jones 00:11:04 Hi, Danny. Lovely to be here today. Thank you for having me.

Danny Wood 00:11:08 Yeah, really nice to have you on the show. As I’ve just said, insurance is often viewed as something that only steps in when things go wrong. You’ve spoken about insurance being a force for good. What does that mean to you, and how can the industry move beyond helping people recover to focus on helping to create better outcomes before problems occur?

Paula Shepherd-Jones 00:11:30 Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Danny. Really, for me, being a force for good is exactly that. It is when insurance is more than protection after a loss. It’s being a force for resilience, for enabling investment and giving people confidence ahead of that crisis. You know, it’s about using our collective power to give back to communities, to employee-led causes, and to people exposed to social, economic, and climate risks around the world. And, you know, the how for me, the how comes down to 2 things. First, mindset. You know, social impact has to be embedded from the top down in our organizations. It has to shift us from reactive to proactive thinking. And secondly, collaboration. And I know we hear that a lot, but, you know, we are never stronger than when we work together. Now, whether that’s within our own organization or within our industry as a whole. Here in New Zealand, we’ve actually already got some great initiatives underway which exemplify force for good. And, you know, a couple of examples would be the NZ Flood Map. You know, this is guiding smarter planning and investment for flood-prone areas. We also have the Natural Hazards Portal, which helps people to understand the risks that are exposed on a particular property or a location. And we also have another great one, which is the Resilient Insurance Markets Initiative. Now, this is actually a collaboration between the Insurance Council of Australia and the Insurance Council of New Zealand, where they’re sharing insights on public-private risk reduction amongst many other things. And if I look, you know, I also like to look, look at us a bit more as well. And if I look at Jewel, And we look globally to dual. We have the Howden Foundation. Now, this is our charity. Now, the Howden Foundation helped to incubate and launch another independent charity called Humanity Insured. Humanity Insured, what they do is they make protection accessible to communities on the climate frontline. And there’s great examples of some of the things they do, and they have preventative measures such as forming sand dams in Kenya, and this is about water retention and holding water underground so women are not walking for miles a day. And we also have the reactive part of it, of insurance, where we have parametric covers that are in place to protect the informal workers in India who are often women against extreme heat, which means that when temperatures hit a certain level, the insurance pays them out so they don’t have to go and work in that terrible heat. And these are just a couple of examples of things that are happening within our own organization. So for me, that’s sort of an encompassment of insurance as a force for good. It’s a protection when things go wrong and prevention so that fewer things do.

Danny Wood 00:14:38 Let’s turn this back on you personally for a moment. Where did your passion for for insurance as a force for good come from, and how’s that influenced the way you lead and the priorities you’re championing at Jewel?

Paula Shepherd-Jones 00:14:52 Yeah, you know, insurance as a force for good, to be honest, it really gives me a sense of purpose. For years working in the corporate world, I really struggled to find the reason until I came to Jewel. You know, social impact here is genuinely embedded in our DNA. And that has helped me find both purpose and alignment in my work. So that’s really my sense of purpose, which I’m very grateful for. And within Jewel, we find this at every level. And from David Howden’s passion for the foundation’s work globally to our own ANZ CEO, Damian Coates, he’s a mental health ambassador for Black Dog. He’s raised over $1 million for their work, right through to every employee who volunteers and fundraisers. and even our own broker partners who give so generously to our charity events. You know, it’s really truly wonderful to see what an organization can achieve when we all share the same goals. And that’s, you know, just turning to how I lead, you know, this really is a key driver in how I lead. We’ve built Joule in New Zealand on diversity and inclusion because when your team reflects your community, the net you cast is wider and so is the social impact you can have. And that’s exactly what we want to achieve. So my leadership team and I, we lead from the front just as our leaders do globally. We prioritize and we back our people’s charity efforts and we champion the causes that they care about, not ones that have been handed down to them. And that for me is a force for good personally. It’s a purpose you can feel right through the organization.

Danny Wood 00:16:40 Paula, under your leadership, Jewel New Zealand’s put some real infrastructure into education as well. There’s the Jewel School, technical briefings, webinars that have issued thousands of CPD points for brokers. Are you seeing any evidence that this has changed what a broker recommends though, or what a client actually does before a loss?

Paula Shepherd-Jones 00:17:00 Yeah, yeah, the education is a real priority for me personally, because if we want to drive this industry forward, our teams and the wider market needs the right skill sets to do so. And to your question there, Danny, yes, we are seeing our work changing the behavior. The dual school and our support, all the supporting materials you mentioned there, get overwhelmingly positive feedback from our broker partners, and even occasionally from some of our peers, some of who use them too, which which is very proud for us. And to give you an idea, over the past year we had just shy of 6,000 registrations in New Zealand alone for our webinars. You know, I consider that we really are creating a real shift. It’s changing how brokers are having their conversations. You know, we deliberately focus on top tips, which is essentially what the broker and the insured actually need to know. Alongside real-world claims examples that explain loss management and mitigation. And to your point of sort of like, you know, are we seeing any evidence of the change? I’d say, well, yes, we are. We’ve received such a lot of feedback. And if I just give you a couple of quotes that come to mind just that we received recently is that, you know, an example would be we’ve had relevant content supported with excellent examples for me to use in my day-to-day role. This really aids discussions with my clients. I have to be across this, and now I can confidently recommend the product. And that’s just to quote a few that we’ve had recently. So what we’re doing here is, you know, we’re moving brokers away from simple placement and towards genuine risk advisory. So the conversation isn’t just, here’s your cover, it’s here’s how you can manage and reduce risk in the first place. And that directly changes what an insured does before a loss ever happens. Because, you know, better educated brokers and better informed clients, that’s how we shift an industry from paying for losses to preventing them.

Danny Wood 00:19:17 One stated aim of the Jewel ANZ business is to grow gross written premium in 5 years from $500 million to $1 billion. There can be a a tension here. I mean, how do you reconcile a growth target which is big in scale like that with a belief that insurance should be doing more than writing premiums and paying claims? Can those 2 objectives pull in the same direction?

Paula Shepherd-Jones 00:19:43 Absolutely they can. In fact, I’d go further and say we can’t actually have one without the other. You know, social impact work has to be funded. We can’t keep supporting our communities backing our charities and doing the good work we do without the income behind it. And growth is what makes it all possible. And, you know, for us, this isn’t abstract. The Howden Foundation is a shareholder of the Howden Group. So every time we grow, we directly grow the foundation’s ability to do more work around the world. The two are really hardwired together. And second to that, we also have a responsibility to our own people to keep moving forward, to keep offering real careers and opportunities long, long into the future. And ultimately, we can’t protect those individuals, the families, and the communities who rely on us if we’re all standing still. So no, I don’t see growth and purpose pulling in different directions. I can see growth as the engine that powers the purpose. Going from $500 million to $1 billion isn’t growth for its own sake. It’s more capacity to protect. more ability to give back, and more careers created. So I make no apology at all for our ambition to keep growing. And for us, it’s simple. The more we grow, the more good we can do.

Danny Wood 00:21:06 There’s broad support for the idea that prevention beats recovery, but less agreement on who pays for it. What broader role can insurers play here?

Paula Shepherd-Jones 00:21:17 Oh, you know, you’re right. Everyone agrees prevention beats recovery, but the moment you ask who pays for it, the room goes really quiet. And that’s exactly why this can’t sit with any one party. Within that, insurers can influence what happens in a few ways. We can advocate and shape policy. And to give you an example of what I mean there, you know, as an industry, we’re pushing for the National Adaptation Framework to be expanded. Now, this framework is the government’s structure for how New Zealand is going to deal with climate risk. And within that structure, there is investment to come into risk reduction. But this has to be an enduring cross-party so it survives changes of government. And hence we are pushing as an industry for this to be expanded that way. We can also bring risk information and data, we can share our modeling capacity transparently, so that everyone makes better decisions, and we can help steer better land use and building decisions through risk-based pricing, and where we have to, cover restrictions that give signals to where and how to build. On top of that, we can drive cross-sector partnerships, and an example is the ICNZ. They’re already very proactive in this area, and that’s the model that we need more of. And we can also lead on client education and the claims underwriting feedback loop because, you know, we are the ones who are uniquely placed to teach our brokers and our insureds about prevention because we are the ones that see where the losses actually come from. So I guess in short, who pays? Well, no one sector can and no one sector should, but insurers really, I feel, are the ones who can connect it all. You know, we have the data, the pricing signals, the education, and that can move us from paying for losses to preventing them.

Danny Wood 00:23:18 As you’ve mentioned, at the bottom of all this is the need for more prevention. What would it take, do you think, for insurers, brokers, and businesses to treat prevention as a priority rather than a kind of add-on?

Paula Shepherd-Jones 00:23:31 Yeah, I think the honest truth is that prevention usually loses out to short-term horizons, right? You know, it’s— we’re asking for a cost to an event that might never happen and would rarely happen within a political term. And that’s exactly why, for example, the National Adaptation Framework matters so much for New Zealand and the fact that it is designed to be enduring. But there’s also structural— there’s a structural issue in insurance as well. Our annual policy cycle is just a narrow snapshot of risk. You know, it limits the incentive to invest in an insured’s multi-year resilience. So If we want prevention to be a priority rather than an add-on, in my mind, 3 things really need to shift. Our industry needs to reframe prevention as the cheapest form of claims management, you know, moving from reactive to proactive with pricing and products that reward risk reduction and openly sharing data and deploying capital to unlock mitigation. Our brokers need to move away from placement to risk advisory, using client education as a business model and shifting the relationship away from being purely transactional. And our businesses, well, they really need better information about their own exposures and tools like the NZ Flood Map and the Natural Hazards Portal will be great enablers here. And also let’s think, you know, businesses need to really treat insurability or in fact the lack thereof as a strategic indicator of financial health, and that turns prevention into a board-level priority. So it’s a shift in mindset across all 3 areas of our industry. And honestly, as a result, I really don’t feel there’s been a more exciting time to be a part of our industry.

Danny Wood 00:25:28 Paula, nice talking with you. Thanks a lot for your time.

Paula Shepherd-Jones 00:25:32 You’re welcome, Danny. Good to see you. Thanks.

Danny Wood 00:25:34 Thank you. And Paula Shepherd-Jones— I’m just going to sign off, that’s all.

Paula Shepherd-Jones 00:25:38 Sorry, sorry.

Danny Wood 00:25:39 No worries. Paula Shepherd-Jones is Managing Director of Jewel New Zealand. Thanks for watching Insurance Business TV. Bye for now.