The Chartered Insurance Institute (CII)’s new five-year ‘Strategic Plan 2023-2027’ is the very embodiment of a ‘spring clean’ – serving as both a reaffirmation of the professional body’s overarching purpose and a roadmap for where it will go next.
Discussing the plan’s launch in an exclusive interview with Insurance Business, CII chief executive Alan Vallance highlighted how it underscores the Institute’s mission – ‘to educate and support our members to deliver services to the highest professional standards and to advocate for the public good’.
Creating the strategy has been an inherently collaborative process, he said, as ordained by the Institute’s unique structure, with the Royal Charter corporation comprising a group of companies including two professional membership bodies – the CII and PFS – and spanning the insurance and personal finance sectors. The report is anchored by six overarching themes, each framed in the context of the pressing external risks facing the CII’s memberships and the people, businesses and communities they serve.
“Behind all these themes is the recognition that this organisation is one of the premier Chartered bodies with a rich history and a huge amount of intellectual property and assets,” Vallance said. “My view is that it’s been a fantastic organisation but I really want to pivot us to bring out that professional membership aspect. And the feedback I’ve got from a lot of [stakeholders] is that it has been a little more focused on being an examinations body in recent years, so we’re re-affirming that we are a professional membership body, supported by excellence in learning and qualifications.”
With that in mind, it’s little surprise that the first of the Institute’s key themes is dedicated to providing ‘excellent member experience’. Membership engagement is the lifeblood of the association and Vallance noted that in recent years, this engagement has not been at the level it should be due to systems issues among other factors.
“We want to make sure that members are reassured that we are very focused on providing a fantastic experience for them in their engagement with the Institute,” he said. “We’re very supportive of our local institutes which are at the forefront of what we do and how we engage with our members and we wanted to make sure they are engaged in this process as well. We want to look at everything that we do going forward to make sure that members get what they want, wherever they want it.”
The strategic plan serves as a ‘reconfirmation’ of the Institute’s dedication to professionalism, Vallance said, which is at the heart of any professional membership body. The organisation’s fundamental responsibility is to provide members with the knowledge and expertise they require to be the best version of themselves. And from conversations across the Institute’s broad membership, he has been delighted to see that they want to be held to these high standards.
“We want this organisation to be recognised as one at the forefront of where the sector is going,” Vallance said of the CII’s commitment to thought leadership. The CII has a huge number of volunteers who have formed into societies or ‘expert groups’ – and it is looking to further leverage the expertise within its membership to create “incubators of thought for the future”.
“We want to be at the forefront of discussions on how the sector is changing and what the implications of that are for individuals,” he said. “On what skills our members will need for the future. On how we can develop the capabilities to support the professionals of the future.”
In that vein, the fourth key strategic theme of the CII’s strategy is centred on ‘world-class learning’. Having the opportunity to visit the Institute’s offices in the Middle East and the Far East, he said, he has seen first-hand how the premier nature of the Institute’s qualifications is seen as an aspirational goal internationally.
The gauntlet of expectation has been thrown down and Vallance emphasised that the Institute is primed, ready and willing to work hard to retain that premier position.
“Retaining that premier position really comes down to making sure the organisation is the best that it can be,” he said. “And that in recognition of the systems issues that we’ve had. We’ve worked hard on resolving those challenges, and our new main CRM system went live last month. So, over the course of this year, we’re going to be spending a lot of time strengthening our foundations, so we’ve got a really solid base to build off in 2024 and beyond.”
The CII’s strategic plan is broadly split into two distinct parts – the agenda for 2023 and the agenda for the subsequent phase 2024-2027. 2023 is all about getting the most pressing issues resolved, he said, and the organisation is well on the path to getting that done. He would expect that members will see these improvements for themselves over the next few months but noted that the work doesn’t stop there.
Sustainability for the CII is about being sustainable in the context of the Institute itself, he said, in terms of financial viability and being fit for the future as much as it is about being environmentally conscious. Among its key considerations are questions regarding the physical footprint of the organisation and considerations around what the workspace of the future might look like.
“It’s early days yet but there’s a lot in there and it’s very ambitious,” Vallance said of the strategic plan. “The next step for us is making it happen and looking specifically at the things we need to do differently or continue to do to deliver on all the actions we’ve identified in the plan.”
In previous roles, Vallance noted that he’s seen great plans written, bound and published and then put into a drawer to be forgotten about. This isn’t one of those kinds of plans, he said, this is a concrete strategy grounded in reality which the CII’s subsequent annual business plans will be aligned to and benchmarked against.
The plan’s launch in Manchester represents quite the full-circle moment, he said, as the Institute in Manchester was instrumental in establishing the CII so many years ago – and it reinforces the deep and abiding connection that the organisation continues to have with its local institutes.
There’s something in the strategy for everyone, Vallance said, and he would encourage the Institute’s membership to closely read and evaluate the action plan in place.
“We're also very keen for members to give us feedback as well, because it is a two-way system,” he said. “We really want members, firstly, to read the plan, and to be enlivened by it because we are really excited by this. But we also want them to engage with us, we want their feedback, we want to know what they think of the plan and what they’re excited by. We’re keen to get feedback on how we need to reshape the organisation over time and documents like this are the beginning of that journey. This is just the start of the story.”
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