Emerging Insight: Applying agility to become an inclusive insurer
25 August 2017
SUNU Assurances is implementing a systematic change management programme for its life insurance business in Cote d’Ivoire, with the support from the ILO’s Impact Insurance Facility and FSD Africa. This programme responds to SUNU Assurance’s drive to embrace a changing environment in the country, characterised by a booming emerging customer base which requires adapted financial protection tools.
SUNU Assurances realised that in order to better meet the needs of emerging customers, it would need to rethink the way it designed, distributed and administered products. Furthermore, it would need to embed these changes in the corporate culture.
Top management support has been vital. The CEO of the company is committed to reaching emerging customers and initiated the project personally. This support, combined with a strong internal communication plan, contributed to placing this project in every staff member’s mind, emphasizing its strategic importance across the company. Nevertheless, as they started implementing the plan, the resistance of many members of staff towards change became a major challenge. They worried about the consequences of such change on their jobs. Management found that talk of change was easily misconstrued as being about “job cuts” and “skills obsolescence”. It therefore had to shift its communication, emphasising the improvements it wanted to bring about and reassuring staff of their position.
Furthermore, management quickly learnt that in order to manage side-projects while running the business as usual, it would need to become more nimble. A cross-functional project team was created, allowing SUNU Assurances to test new processes on a small scale within the project team, before having to make difficult changes across the entire organisation. They also learnt that challenging the status quo by rolling-out a new operating model across the company would require agility in human resources management. With its low-ticket, high-volume transactions, inclusive and mobile insurance requires more efficient policy administration, requiring an evolution of job descriptions and staff skills. This evolution aims at shifting from processing fewer individual transactions manually to developing new skills around monitoring and controlling automated bulk processing of a much greater number of transactions.
So far, SUNU Assurances has seen how an agile approach is allowing them to become an inclusive insurer in Cote d’Ivoire. Found out more about their experience by listening to the recording of our webinar on “Making change happen within insurers”.
SUNU Assurances realised that in order to better meet the needs of emerging customers, it would need to rethink the way it designed, distributed and administered products. Furthermore, it would need to embed these changes in the corporate culture.
Top management support has been vital. The CEO of the company is committed to reaching emerging customers and initiated the project personally. This support, combined with a strong internal communication plan, contributed to placing this project in every staff member’s mind, emphasizing its strategic importance across the company. Nevertheless, as they started implementing the plan, the resistance of many members of staff towards change became a major challenge. They worried about the consequences of such change on their jobs. Management found that talk of change was easily misconstrued as being about “job cuts” and “skills obsolescence”. It therefore had to shift its communication, emphasising the improvements it wanted to bring about and reassuring staff of their position.
Furthermore, management quickly learnt that in order to manage side-projects while running the business as usual, it would need to become more nimble. A cross-functional project team was created, allowing SUNU Assurances to test new processes on a small scale within the project team, before having to make difficult changes across the entire organisation. They also learnt that challenging the status quo by rolling-out a new operating model across the company would require agility in human resources management. With its low-ticket, high-volume transactions, inclusive and mobile insurance requires more efficient policy administration, requiring an evolution of job descriptions and staff skills. This evolution aims at shifting from processing fewer individual transactions manually to developing new skills around monitoring and controlling automated bulk processing of a much greater number of transactions.
So far, SUNU Assurances has seen how an agile approach is allowing them to become an inclusive insurer in Cote d’Ivoire. Found out more about their experience by listening to the recording of our webinar on “Making change happen within insurers”.