Material Issues
As well as focusing on our strategic priorities, we also identify material issues which could affect our ability to achieve our purpose. These issues help guide our approach to shared value and the efforts we make to create safer, stronger and more confident communities.
We engage with a wide range of stakeholders to identify issues that are important to our customers, employees, partners, shareholders and the communities in which we operate. We then prioritise these based on their potential impact to our business performance, and their importance to our stakeholders. Based on these assessments, our material issues for 2016 were:
ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE ALIGNED TO PURPOSE
A strong organisational culture is a key ingredient for sustained commercial success and to deliver on our aspirational purpose. Our culture must ensure we connect our teams to create solutions that will benefit our customers, communities and shareholders. The diversity of our workforce must reflect the customers and communities we are targeting and we must apply inclusive behaviours that ensure we problem solve and make decisions in a more agile manner. Our leaders must be able to drive accountability for productivity and performance and inspire meaningful work and a shared sense of purpose.
CUSTOMER AND PARTNER EXPERIENCE
Meeting the evolving needs of our customers and partners is critical to our long term success. Shifts are evident in the way people buy and claim on insurance and we must continue to ensure our relationships with our partners remain relevant. We recognise that establishing trust and confidence to earn and retain customer and partner loyalty requires increased engagement and empathy, and a heightened ability to respond with the right products and services.
DISRUPTION, INNOVATION AND MEETING FUTURE NEEDS
Our rapidly changing operating environment means we must continue to explore new ways of getting closer to our customers. Today’s digital world is built for speed and we see a significant opportunity to evolve quickly in this area. Responding to, and anticipating the future needs of our customers, through product development and innovation, is critical. As we now work in a volatile, complex and ambiguous world, disruptive trends are likely to occur together creating an effect where the speed of impact is higher than expected. We must be prepared to act by embracing agile ways of working and making decisions and removing complexity from our business.
CLIMATE AND NATURAL PERILS
Every year our customers are affected by natural disasters and IAG pays millions of dollars in claims to help our customers recover from these events. Natural disasters cannot be avoided, but their impact can be mitigated and minimised. IAG recognises climate change is having an impact on the frequency and severity of natural perils, and that there is an opportunity to do more to help customers, partners and communities understand risk and build resilience to mitigate future impacts.
COMMUNITY RESILIENCE
Building community resilience is vital to reducing the cost of the increasing risk to lives, livelihoods and property. Improving understanding of the risks people face is critical to improving safety on our roads, in our homes and in businesses. Resilient communities are better prepared and recover more quickly, which results in fewer claims and lower costs for our business and safer, stronger and more confident communities.
ACCESS AND AFFORDABILITY
Many people do not have adequate insurance cover for reasons ranging from affordability, to a lack of understanding of their needs, or a lack of products to suit their situations. Not having access to the right insurance cover leaves individuals and their communities at risk of non-insurance and under-insurance, which reduces their ability to recover from adverse events. This also provides a market opportunity for IAG with new products or expanded levels of cover.
FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE
The insurance industry goes through cycles of profitability that are affected by changing competitor landscapes, macroeconomic conditions and major insurance events. Managing our financial performance sustainably through the cycle is critical to our long term success and our ability to deliver value to our shareholders and other key stakeholders. Our response to these conditions can be found throughout this annual review.
Our work to address these material issues is covered in our shared value reporting located here on this website.