{"id":36655,"date":"2017-03-31T09:30:59","date_gmt":"2017-03-30T22:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/?p=36655"},"modified":"2017-04-05T07:44:37","modified_gmt":"2017-04-04T20:44:37","slug":"philosophy-more-important-than-process-for-life-insurers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/2017\/03\/31\/philosophy-more-important-than-process-for-life-insurers\/","title":{"rendered":"Philosophy More Important Than Process for Life Insurers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Life insurers should be guided by a strong philosophy more than strong processes, according to the head of a life insurer, who claimed good philosophy would result in better client outcomes during difficult claims.<\/p>\n

\"MetLife's<\/a>
MetLife Australia CEO, Deanne Stewart<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

MetLife Insurance Chief Executive, Deanne Stewart<\/strong> made the statement at the recent FSC Life Insurance Conference, adding that a well-developed philosophy of life insurance could guide the internal and external behaviours of life insurers when dealing with consumers and other industry stakeholders.<\/p>\n

\u201cPhilosophy should guide your policy, should guide your processes. As it relates to culture, it is like the guard rails of the behaviour that you are wanting to see in an organisation,\u201d Stewart said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome companies created it quickly but I think many in the industry have realised the importance of philosophy and taking the time to get that right to truly be the signpost for that organisation in the public\u2019s eye,\u201d Stewart added.<\/p>\n

This approach had led MetLife to walk away from a tender for a super fund last year, Stewart said, after the fund stated its approach was to minimise as many claims as it could pay.<\/p>\n

\u201cPhilosophy should guide your policy…it is like the guard rails of the behaviour that you are wanting to see in an organisation”<\/h6>\n

Stewart also said processes should not dictate how an insurer behaved and that a good philosophy would provide better outcomes for policy holders.<\/p>\n

\u201cGetting the culture right and the guard rails and behaviours and values, rather than just working from a piece of paper, is so critical for us as an industry constantly getting each of these decisions right, because you cannot write the rules for all of them,\u201d Stewart said.<\/p>\n

Stewart also called on leaders within life insurers to adopt their company\u2019s philosophy pointing out that they were under constant watch by staff and that behaviour at the top of an insurer set the tone for the whole of the business.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are the role models for setting of the values. The values might sit on a wall but actually it\u2019s everyone in the organisation watching how we act that truly sets the values and the culture,\u201d Stewart said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs leaders, thinking deeply about how we role model the values in our everyday action is important but also really critical is when we are making the hard decisions. When facing into tough decisions everyone is watching and seeing what is effective and what they should be doing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Life insurers should be guided by a strong philosophy more than strong processes, according to the head of a life insurer, who claimed good philosophy would result in better client outcomes during difficult claims.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[282,241],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-associations","category-conferences-and-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36655\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}