New Ireland Assurance Advisor Portal Qorus Innovation in Insurance Awards 2024

Executive Summary: The challenge we set for ourselves was ambitious and required a complete transformation of our ways of working, how we operated and how we delivered change as an organisation. This presented many challenges which were overcome through strong leadership and a clear vision. Our key innovation, the Advisor Portal, was central to this transformation. Ultimately significant cultural change was delivered within our organisation and this has resulted in New Ireland becoming an agile, digitally focussed business that can react quickly to our customers changing needs and expectations. Traditionally financial advisors, operating face-to-face with customers, were the basis of the Life Assurance industry in Ireland. This model is underpinned by paper and labour-intensive back-office functions, typically supported by disparate IT systems. This makes the end to end customer journeys from initial customer engagement and onward through the back office to completion long, with many human touchpoints. It’s expensive to deliver, isn’t scalable, is based on out-dated work-practices and is not customer-centric. Through the adoption of innovative technology, we set out to transform our operating model and core processes to a standardised automated approach, creating efficiencies in back-end systems and processes. This would also allowed us reallocate colleagues into roles and activities that really leveraged their expertise instead of spending time on labour-intensive administrative activities that could be done through technology. We also introduced technology at the front-end which frees up advisors to really focus on providing financial advice to customers. We partnered with 3rd party fintechs, leading technology providers whose expertise complements our strengths, combining their experience in digital development with our subject matter expertise, compliance and regulatory knowledge, as well as our scale and customer base. This all required significant cultural change, both to become a digital business and for our delivery team had to adapt to partnering with 3rd party agile fintechs. We had to marry the cultures and approaches that such traditionally different organisations have. New Ireland needed to adapt to, and adopt new ways of working and of delivering change. This was a challenge for all parties but the outstanding results delivered by the team are testament to the learnings all organisations have taken on board and benefited from. The new customer proposition and digital business model delivered, with our new Advisor Portal at the centre is a gamechanger. It combines digital technologies and our colleague’s expertise. It enables us be a digital modern business, it completely transforms how our workforce service our clients, and the very insurance market in Ireland itself and what we have built is now being looked at in the UK and Australia as the model for businesses going forward.

Innovation Presentation: Traditional customer engagements require significant colleague and customer effort. Research shows that more than a third of consumers would leave their provider if they didn’t offer more up to date technology, and that digital channels can enable more personalisation, create real-time tools to serve customers and for customers to self-serve, freeing up colleagues to focus on more worthwhile and beneficial activities. Digital channels also enable experimentation and real-time customer feedback to learn what works for customers (CX Academy CX Report). To deliver on our ambition of delivering enhanced, efficient ways of working and really brilliant customer experiences for now and for the future, we explored different digital solutions, partnering with key 3rd party fintechs, leading technology providers whose expertise complements our strengths. Our new Advisor Portal then became the centre of significant change across our workforce both in how we organised ourselves to deliver change and also in how we re-organised the broader operations teams to service our customers digitally. The innovation has also facilitated large Broker partners in carrying our their own workforce transformations as they utilise our digital proposition to transform their business model. Putting the customer experience and more efficient work practices at the core of our ambition resulted in a completely reimagined digital proposition, delivered through a network of key digital platforms and new technologies that we developed with our partners. Central to the new model is our Advisor Portal, the digital fulcrum around which a number of other ‘satellite’ digital platforms connect, allowing customers engage through different channels how and when they want and critically streamlining out back office functions which frees colleagues up to focus on more complex activities where their expertise is of most value. A suite of API connectors was constructed to form a single experience layer between all components, centralising the ownership and change governance for the connected journeys, and more importantly create seamless customer transitions as they moved through the end to end journey.