OUR STRATEGIC PRIORITIES

Our goal is to deliver amazing customer experiences that contribute to making their world a safer place.

This year, we introduced a number of new and enhanced products and services to better meet customer needs.

We developed product design principles to ensure that our products and services meet the needs and expectations of our customers; deliver fair value for money and protect our customers from the risk of unexpected financial loss; and are easy to understand.

We expanded our partner repair network across all our brands in Australia to deliver the industry-leading standards captured in our IAG Quality Framework to every customer, with every repair. The standards cover the quality of repairs as well as the quality of customer service and the speed of repairs. We also streamlined our claims lodgement, assessment and repairs process to help get our customers back on the road faster.

In New Zealand, AMI built on its 'new New Zealanders' program for non-English speaking migrants, with a new digital and voice service for Chinese speaking business customers, and established its first specialist Chinese speaking claims team.

IAG also launched its first rapid repair facility in Auckland's North Shore, in partnership with Repair Management New Zealand, to help customers get their cars back faster.

In late 2016, NZI became the first insurer in New Zealand to insure a fully automated vehicle, when we insured a 15-person driverless electric shuttle that is being trialled at Christchurch International Airport.

In Australia, the New South Wales Government has partnered with IAG, HMI Technologies, NRMA Motoring & Services, Telstra and the Olympic Park Authority on a two-year trial of the state’s first driverless shuttle, at Olympic Park. Our insurance expertise is invaluable, given that insurance is a critical part of the safe and effective adoption of driverless vehicles to ensure trust, protection and safety on the road.

In an effort to reduce distracted driving, we are developing and testing a smartphone app that will reward good driving behaviour. The app will track whether drivers used their phones in the car trip for any reason whatsoever and will offer rewards to motivate good driving behaviour.

We launched a multi-peril crop insurance product to protect farmers against yield shortfall caused by natural perils such as flood, frost, drought and vermin. Crop Income Protection is being offered to Landmark customers insured with CGU and WFI, who grow crops in Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales.

Through NRMA Insurance and CGU, we are offering specialised hobby farm insurance products directly to customers, online. Customers can cover leisure and hobby farms under 80 hectares that generate less than $50,000 turnover each year, and include their domestic homestead as well as their farm operations on one policy.

To better meet the needs of small-to-medium enterprises and more complex business risks, CGU launched Fusion, a newly combined machinery, computer and business interruption product.

NRMA Insurance introduced a new customer management system to enhance the quality and efficiency of conversations with customers. It also added lifestyle products such as caravan to its online product range.

Looking to the future, we established the Firemark Labs incubation hub in Sydney and Firemark Labs innovation hub in Singapore to drive innovation and collaboration by connecting IAG talent, insights and capabilities with external partners who can help IAG design new customer experiences for today – and tomorrow.

Already, we have partnered with several organisations, including The University of Sydney, cyber security start-up UpGuard and rental platform Snug.co, who will work within Firemark Labs on new projects.

Firemark Labs Sydney and Singapore will be supported by Firemark Ventures, our $75 million fund that will invest in, and partner with, both start-ups and emerging businesses that have the potential to disrupt the insurance value chain.

In India, SBI General is launching a new process for motor claims where a claim is handled by a single claim handler from initiation to settlement. Customers receive updates on the status of their claim directly from the claim handler managing their claim, leading to an improved customer experience.

In Thailand, Safety is establishing a stable and cost efficient method of measuring the Claims team's net promoter scores, using tools to capture data and communicate results to management.

We need to simplify our operating platform to allow us to deliver amazing experiences to our customers, in the most efficient and effective way. Simplifying our operating platform will also create capacity for us to continue to invest in, or fuel, our business.

Advances in technology mean that many processes in our industry can be automated and we have established partnerships with global leaders in automation to improve our efficiency and reduce costs.

Our Operations division is working to consolidate and simplify IAG’s core technology systems across Australia and New Zealand, including using the proven Guidewire platform. We are well advanced on our work to reduce our 32 policy and claims systems to two and have started work on rationalising our product range from 1,500 products to just over 400.

We took a significant step towards simplifying our business in July 2017 when we announced the creation of one Australian business, headed by Mark Milliner as CEO Australia. The Australia Division brings together the Consumer, Business, Satellite and Operations divisions to create a single Australian business with end-to-end responsibility for the customer experience.

In New Zealand, a centralised Operations unit has been established to simplify and unify our claims operating model, bringing together the Consumer claims team, Business claims team, and Claims Services to improve claims performance and better deliver to our customers’ needs.

We further simplified our business from 1 August 2017 when we consolidated our nine Australian insurance licences to two.

These actions are core to us achieving the commitment we made in December 2016 to reduce our gross operating costs by an annual run rate of at least 10%, or $250 million pre-tax, by the end of the 2019 financial year.

Our ability to achieve our leading and fuelling goals depends on our ability to become an agile organisation where our people have a sense of alignment and greater clarity on how they can respond to the evolving needs of our customers.

Agility at IAG encompasses being connected to our customers, partners and people; building stronger relationships; and a focus on achievement. Our organisational design enables this approach and we measure our progress regularly.

THE WAY WE WORK

The way we work is defined in our spirit of closer, braver, faster. Closer captures our move from a product centred approach to a customer centred approach; braver applies to the important organisational change we are making from being siloed, to being less hierarchical; and faster covers the need for decisiveness in a changing world.

We are changing our ways of working to support our customer and simplification priorities. For example, we use human centred design thinking to build solutions in an interactive customer centred way, collaborating across our divisions.

While we build our business plans for the longer term, we structure these into rolling three-month plans that help focus our leaders’ attention on the critical few challenges that will drive our strategy.

ORGANISATIONAL DESIGN

We are building an effective, adaptive organisational design that works today, and allows us to continue to build and adapt. The recent establishment of the Australia Division demonstrates our successful application of organisational design. The design of the organisation has focused on the work we need to do to be successful. We have also considered the reporting relationships that will help drive performance and support our people.

MEASUREMENT OF OUR CULTURE

To stay connected to the pulse of our organisation, we have created real-time dashboards that measure the extent to which our people: feel connected and aligned; have ways of working that allow for faster decision making; and experience effective leadership. By asking a short series of questions more frequently, we can generate insights that can help our leaders build a more agile, connected and constructive culture. The dashboard also reports on workplace health and safety incidents, investigation and rectification.

The feedback we obtain from our people supports our communication with them so they can deliver to our customers and our communities every day.

WORKFORCE DESIGN

Workforce design helps us to focus on having the right skills, experience and capability to deliver now and into the future. To achieve this, we use internal and external insights to anticipate the future demands for skills within our organisation, as well as considering how technology will affect the ways our customers live, how and where our people prefer to work, and future types of work. This helps us plan for accessible and flexible working practices such as extending our work from home program, which is currently experienced by more than 60% of our Australian call centre sales and service people.

Delivering on our strategic priorities of customer and simplification means that the core capabilities we need to build in our workforce include digital technology, data and analytics; these skills will need to complement our existing skills.

At the same time, we want to ensure that we have diversity in our workforce skill and experience, to reflect our customers. As well as focusing on diversity, we are emphasising the creation of a sense of belonging. We expect our leaders to create this environment for our people, and our customers. We are also working with our people to build skills for the future relevance of their careers and their ability to deliver for our customers. All our people have access to the latest online learning tools such as Lynda.com so they can build skills in a wide range of topics at times that suit them.

These initiatives will ensure we provide a work environment where our people feel empowered to bring their whole selves to work and contribute their best every day. Our approach recognises that it is our people who will ensure we achieve for our customers, communities and shareholders.