Ensuring staff alignment
With so much happening at once, Gupta says HBF was at pains to ensure its transformation activities remained aligned with its end goals by adopting guiding principles such as ‘simply human’ and ‘members are our reason for being’.
This has been brought to life through specific outcomes such as HBF’s self-service portal registration process, which Gupta says has been reduced from six fields down to just two. Another key focus was accessibility and inclusivity where HBF worked with the Centre for Accessibility Australia to optimise the website with screen readers that will aid the experience for visually impaired people.
“Having the clarity of rationale as to why you are doing (the change) is very important, because otherwise people will start to lose faith, because these are complex changes and are long running,” Gupta said.
“Stakeholder management and governance structures are critical, because people change, but then from a program perspective it is important to deliver in chunks that are addressable and reachable, so teams who are working on it can see the progress.”
This transformation activity also accompanied the introduction of a new scaled agile operating model, with the business leads now accountable for the management and delivery of all future changes.
“All of our new assets, like the core system and the CRM, are headed by business owners – not tech teams,” Gupta said.
“Tech teams sit as the enablers in those verticals, helping them deliver on their objectives.
“That is allowing us to deliver closer to our members, but also improve the velocity of change, and is allowing us to prioritise in every quarter what is more important as things evolve.”
Gupta says that while this transformation activity has enabled HBF to move ahead of its competitors in terms of digital capability, significant work remains in improving underlying processes and driving continuous innovation, including through the introduction of AI-based systems.
“We are picking and choosing where we can further improve and enhance, and at the same time, launching additional products which are more focused on the value that the members are seeking in a much quicker-time-to-market,” he said.
Seeking AI assistance
Gupta isn’t the only insurance technology leader with a strong interest in AI. According to Gartner, AI software spending in the global insurance market is forecast to increase 17.4 percent in 2024 to US$9.5 billion ($15.25 billion), on its way to US$15.9 billion ($25.52 billion) by 2027.
Leading that charge in Australia is the multibrand general insurer IAG, where AI’s capabilities are aligning perfectly with a long-term strategic decision to decentralise its technology function.
According to IAG’s chief operating officer Neil Morgan, late last decade IAG took a view that operating a central technology function was not the right approach for an organisation that wanted to be highly customer- and growth-oriented, and instead it should recognise that capabilities were now available to people who were less technically skilled.
“The philosophy has been to build strong, scaled, core foundational capabilities, and to bring that to a point where we can move into a new wave of innovating on top of it, deploying small improvements that add up to a different customer experience and a different business outcome on top of those transformed cores,” Morgan said.
“That happens to have been quite nicely timed for us, with a whole bunch of new capabilities and tools becoming available in the form of generative AI-based tooling.”
IAG has succeeded in bringing together 15 claims platforms and multiple pricing and policy platforms together to create an environment where it can build capability on top.
“For those types of solutions, we are choosing industrialised capability that we know will scale, where performance is something we can continue to tune over time – that is the infrastructure of the company,” Morgan said.
“And where we want to spend our time being a bit more innovative and bolder, and take risks on platforms that might change over time, is deployed on top of that.