Olivier LaFontaine:
I am Olivier Lafontaine, and this is Life Accelerated, a podcast for life insurers who want to achieve digital transformation. When we talk about digital transformation in the insurance industry, it's easy to think of it as a sprint, a fast-paced race to implement new technology. But in reality, it's more like an ultra marathon, a long challenging journey that demands endurance, strategy, and the right team to cross the finish line. In this episode, I speak with Michael New, Chief Technology Officer at Clearview. As a seasoned leader in large-scale digital migrations and a competitive ultra marathon runner, Michael brings a unique perspective on what it takes to successfully transform a life insurance business. We'll talk about the challenges of moving legacy systems into the future, how data readiness can make or break a migration, and why patients and precision are key to building a modern digitally enabled insurer. So let's get into it.
Olivier Lafontaine
Okay. Welcome, Bill, to the show again. I know you've been here a couple years ago, I think, so it's really great that you're taking the time to be with us again. We'll start with our first question. I guess I want to know what have you been up to since you last came on our podcast?
Bill Pappas
Thank you, Olivier. I'm excited to be here and I'm excited having the discussion with you. You're right, it's almost been almost a year and a half since the last time that we have the discussion. So I'll say three things happening. Two of them is on the MetLife front. One of this is personally, but the first on the MetLife is we have new strategy. The last quarter December of last year, we introduced a new strategy within MetLife, which we call it New Frontier. And that strategy you will see that focuses on growth, returns, and all where the performance, our ability to be able to manage growth in returns throughout the volatility that we see over the next five years. And it's exciting because it capitalize on all of the competitive modes that we have developed over the last 157 years. So think about our geographies, our product, our distribution, and for us from a technology and data perspective, it enables new frontier and activates new frontier as we are moving forward, either by helping the business to win in the marketplace with what we already have or by developing new and exciting opportunities to get us through this.
Bill Pappas
So new strategy grounded on the growth in returns and all weather. It's number one. Number two, the last year and a half we have spent a lot more time maturing our AI framework. Not only understanding obviously what the technologies out there, but equally important, how do you take that technology and how do you define the path to value for MetLife? So we spend a significant amount of time getting us really operationalizing AI and finding the benefits for our customers, our associates, our shareholders. And the last but not least, we talked about personally, you and I chat about it a couple of minutes ago. I just came back from hiking Mount Kilimanjaro, so I spent almost seven days in Tanzania with two of my daughters being able to conquer and summit and gaining an opportunities and kind of memories of a lifetime. So that's what I've been through since the last time I spoken to you.
Olivier Lafontaine
That sounds great. Do you make a parallel between the trek to Kilimanjaro and what's required in the life insurance industry? Have you thought about this a little bit?
Bill Pappas
Yeah, I mean not really, but I'll tell you one thing. It just preparation. So whatever you do, one of the things that I found it fascinating, and I do like a lot of those type of extreme sports, you need to require a lot of preparation, which focus and discipline to be able to do that. And I can see that at MetLife and the way that we are managing a company over the last five years required tremendous amount of preparation, focus and execution. And I think that was definitely an area that I felt as we were preparing to summit Kilimanjaro. And the other thing is the idea of being able to shift perspective and reframe reality as the environment is changing really rapidly. So when we went to Kilimanjaro, we have a pretty good idea of what we were expecting, but things change really, really fast.
Bill Pappas
So our ability to be able to shift our perspective, reframe reality and being relevant and making sure that you do what it takes to be able to summit is something that I have seen on the business side as well. I mean, if I look at the last five years, I think a lot of things happened that it was on nobody's radar screen or there was not playbook. And our ability to be agile and draw on the preparations that you always do to be able to, like I said, weather the performance and deliver what we need for the customer, it's something that I see tremendous amount of connectivity between what we did with climbing.
Olivier Lafontaine
Great. Very exciting. Very insightful as well. So if I want to recap, if we would like to recap a little bit your own personal journey in the industry, what other roles you had before now you ended up with the GTO at MetLife. It would be great for our listeners that were not there in the last podcast a year and a half ago.
Bill Pappas
Yeah, no thank, absolutely. So I joined MetLife right before the pandemic. It was November 2019 after I spent the majority of my career with Bank of America. I spent almost 20 years with Bank of America. So I grew up on what I call within technology and operations, but across multiple different products. I grew up on the capital market side. I had an opportunity to be able to spend time on the commercial side of the house and I finished my career with Bank of America on the consumer and wealth management side. So not only I understood the functional responsibility of technology and operations, but I was able to see how do you take those disciplines and apply them at a very different businesses across the company. So I came in and I came into MetLife with, and what drew me to MetLife, it was our strategy. And I remember speaking to then newly appointed CEO, Michel Khalaf, talking to me about MetLife's purpose, always with you, building a more confident future and doing that by putting the customer at the center of everything that we do.
Bill Pappas
And it sounds very simple, but if you think about what happened the last five years is how do you redesign and how do you build solutions to be able to meet your customer needs with they change rapidly as we speak. So that was the attraction as I came in, I have the privilege of being able to manage close 38,000 resources across 40 different markets and they really span from technology to infrastructure to data and analytics to cyber, but also operations and services. So my team has the privilege to be able to just manage the entire customer experience into our company. And that was the attraction of coming in and doing it in a completely different market. I understood the banking, this is the insurance, but as long as you put the customer at the center of everything that we do, everything that we are focusing on, it was very similar.
Bill Pappas
So for us, my team has five key priorities as they're all coming together is to enable the business to be able to just win in the marketplace, to simplifying and modernize our company. We've been around for 157 years as you can imagine. In some cases we have two or three of everything. So we spend a significant amount of time making sure that we becoming more modern as we're moving forward. How do we protect the company? This is our cyber and this is our data governance teams that we have in place. And how do you do all of that at a unit cost that keeps you competitive in the marketplace, but also having a contemporary workforce and you build a culture that you attract the talent that you need to be able to do that. So exciting and fascinating opportunity within MetLife. And believe it or not, I'm here almost six years with this. Time flies when you have a lot of fun.
Olivier Lafontaine
Yes. I guess you have a unique perspective coming in the industry relatively recently. A lot of people have been in life insurance for 20 years and more, but it's interesting to see someone coming from a banking side having a fresh perspective on things. And you've talked a little bit about that in your last comment, but I want to double click on that a little bit. What do you see are the biggest challenges or changes that you're seeing are going to be affecting, are affecting the life insurance industry since now you've had a couple years obviously to get your arms around the problems that we're facing?
Bill Pappas
And I had almost six years, Olivier, to be honest with you, it feels like a lot more than that in a good sense because of the pace of what we have seen in the market. I'll tell you one thing, the thing that it just surprised me at the beginning as I joined MetLife, it's how little different the insurance industry is from the banking industry to be honest with you. Because at the end of the day, the customers at the center of both of them and what the customer really needs is the same thing. They need the products, they need to those products to be simple for them to use. You need to protect them, the assets that they have and you need to be able to service them the way that they want to be serviced. So on a high level perspective, I mean I do the same thing I did on the banking.
Bill Pappas
I'm doing it into what we talked about it from an insurance perspective. But for me what was interesting for the last five, almost six years, it was four things that really have changed significant. Number one, and I'm not sure if this is only insurance, but it's probably definitely within the financial services. Number one, we have seen a conversion of change that we have never seen before. And this is for me just thinking about from the geopolitical issues that you see across to the customer preferences that have changed significant to proliferation of AI to regulatory environment, to even our workforce. So for us as leaders, before we needed to do one versus the other, what we have seen the last five years is that conversion of change that we needed to do all of it. So how do you sequence that amount of change to make sure that your workforce and your customers understand it was very, very important and very new?
Bill Pappas
The second thing that I have seen is we've never as a technologies have the options and the choices that we have today, especially for the last couple of years as AI and the emerging technology came in. So I remember I grew up on technology that you usually had one or two choices when you had to choose a platform. Right now you have so many solutions available to you that you as a leader, not only you quickly need to understand them, but also you quickly need to figure out what is the long-term implications of those options and the choices that you need to make. And also making sure that you're not closing up any opportunities that may come up 12 months down the road that you will never had them before. So that options and choices, it's a very interesting component from a leadership perspective to manage.
Bill Pappas
The third thing I found it fascinating is the creation of new execution playbooks. So think about the last five years, we had to figure out how do we manage the pandemic. We had to figure out how do you manage emerging tools? You had to figure out how do you manage responsible use of AI. There was not a lot of existing playbooks, so the leaders had to develop new execution playbooks at the same time that they needed to execute. And the other thing that we find fascinating, those playbooks, they're becoming more integrated. So from a customer perspective, they're asking me for more digital, more self-service options, but they also wanted to make sure that those options, they're very secure. So how do I look at the playbook, the cyber playbook and the digital playbook and bring them together? The customers are asking me both high tech but also high touch solutions.
Bill Pappas
They're telling me, give me the solutions to be able to take the transactional nature of our interactions away, but also I want you to be there when you need the most. So you have a lot of conversion of chains, you have a lot of options that coming in, you have a new creation of those playbooks that they're more interrelated now versus standalone. And the last thing you need to be able to execute not only with speed and discipline, but being able to execute at scale to really make a difference for what you're trying to do in your business. So for me, away from all the new tools that are coming in from a leadership perspective, those five things is redefining the role that the CIOs or the COOs are playing within our companies as we're moving forward.
Olivier Lafontaine
That's great. And a hundred percent agree. Those are the challenges that the CIOs face and CEOs also in multiple lines of business in the financial services industry. I know you talk a lot about customer experience and CX and how important that is to MetLife and your own journey. If we were to talk about the key emerging technologies that you think have the ability to significantly enhance CX and fulfill customer expectations, what would be your answer to that?
Bill Pappas
I will say definitely AI. AI is an opportunity of a lifetime and I call it an opportunity of a lifetime because it's really becoming a force multiplier to our strategy. But for us at MetLife with focus on what I call composite AI, which is the combination of the classical AI that we've been doing for years, the automation that we always have available and we know how to do that, but also you sprinkling in all the generative AI and most recent the agentic AI solutions that are coming in. So the combination of all of those things are giving us a unique opportunity and I call it a life, an opportunity of a lifetime to be able to service our customers and quite frankly, become a force multiplier for a strategy that we have in MetLife. And one of the things that was interesting for us early on after those initial headlines that everybody thought that those solutions will be solving everything, we noticed some very specific shift in the marketplace.
Bill Pappas
We quickly figured out it was not the technology capabilities that we were after per se, but it was the value. So the whole idea, it's not the tools, but it is the ultimate value. What we found with the tools. At the end of the day, the tools are kind of maturing so fast, the tools is going to work, but how do they work into your environment? Especially for companies that've been around for 157 years and they have a lot of legacy, but ultimately, where is the value that those tools brings to the table? The second thing that we realized as we were thinking about and talking about AI almost a year and a half ago, it's being more realistic around the benefits. So the rightsizing of the AI benefits, and that was where the combination between the maturity of the tools that they're available, but also your ability to plug them into your own ecosystem.
Bill Pappas
One of the things that we have done really well in MetLife. We spent significant amount of time in investment to do nothing more by getting our company to be more contemporary. Saying it another way, take away a lot of the legacy. It was an interesting article almost like seven months ago at Wall Street from Christopher Mims that talk about across financial services, we have 1.5 trillion dollars of tech debt. So the realization is when you have, well you have availability of new emerging tools, those tools cannot be working in isolation. They need to be plugged in into our ecosystems. And until your ecosystem is contemporary enough, you're never going to be able to get all the benefits out of this. So rightsizing and understanding those benefits at the same time that you don't lose sight of what is your ultimate goal with emerging tools, which is the value to the company was very important.
Bill Pappas
And then we pay close attention in terms of what is the partner ecosystem. There is so many choices and so much involvement, evolutions happening across. How do you select the right solution for the right opportunity that will ultimately help your business to move forward? So when we looked at composite AI, when we look at all those initial headlines, we put a framework in place that it was the CEO-led. So I'm lucky enough to be part of the company that my CEO, Michel Khalaf, never saw AI as a technology opportunity. He saw AI as a business opportunity to be able to accelerate a strategy. So for us, our framework is CEO-led with federated ownership across the line of business. AI is a force multiplier to an existing strategy versus a strategy on its own and freely focusing on the ultimate value. And that value is from a customer perspective, from an associate perspective and also from a shareholder's perspective.
Bill Pappas
So it is an opportunity of a lifetime as long as you have the right framework. And the way we activate the framework is through technology and the balance between modernizing and simplifying your infrastructure at the same time that you are understanding the emerging tools and you plug them in your ability to democratize data. Data is important because you can develop a lot of solutions, but you need the data to fit into those solutions. And how do you do that in a responsible way? So we talked a lot about fairness, transparency, privacy, security, performance. How do you build all those pieces into that and then how do you make sure that you have the right workforce, that they have the skillset and the leadership ability to be able to do that? So AI is definitely an opportunity of a lifetime, but it needs to have a very measure and thoughtful way as you implement it to be able to get benefits at scale in a sustainable but also responsible way.
Olivier Lafontaine
I like that a lot. Rightsize expectations for benefits because we hear so much in conferences, you obviously do talks in conferences and we hear everything and it's contrary, I suppose, by speakers. And the reality in the end is how much value does it bring to the customer? How do you measure the success of those technologies? It is not by measuring the coolness of a tool. It is by in the end business outcomes.
Bill Pappas
And I think you nailed it. And the other thing that is interesting, I think those tools, they're actually really cool. I'm not going to lie to you and I'm excited as a technologist because they have the opportunity, but at the same time, those tools, they need to be really bolt into your ecosystem. So in order to get the benefit of those tools, you cannot skip the step of simplifying your infrastructure and that goes back. So I think those tools have an opportunity that we have never seen before, but you still need to ensure that you have modernized and simplify your infrastructure to be able to maximize the benefits of those tools. So while a lot of the consultants may be right when they put a number there, they're assuming that you are a small brand new company that you don't have everything else. And the reality is going back to the Wall Street Journal, 1.5 trillion of tech debt across financial services. So you need to balance the investment on both those aspects, simplifying and then understanding and bringing in the tools. And to your point with the ultimate goal, it's the value to your company, to your customers, and quite frankly in a lot of cases to your associate, makes it easier for your associate to be able to service our customers.
Olivier Lafontaine
That's great. And if we segue into our next question, talking about how you fit the technology and AI into your environment, into your company, I suppose, and each insurance company is going to be a little bit different, but can you tell us a little bit about MetLife's priorities right now, specifically around projects or technologies you're looking at?
Bill Pappas
Of course now, just from a MetLife's priority number one is obviously from an enterprise perspective focusing on rolling out a new strategy. And the exciting thing about New Frontier, which is a strategy that we just unveiled in December, it's really grounded around growth returns and our ability to be able to bring the growth in returns while we have what we call all weather performance, which really means our ability to be able to manage the growth and the returns at any environment that we either predict or in some cases unpredictable. Just look what happened the last couple of months as well. From a function perspective, I'll go back and say for us our priorities kind of remaining the same. I mean we are here to enable the business and what does that really mean? That really means to be able to develop new capabilities to win in the marketplace, but also service our customers and design those customers journeys in such a way that the customers want being served the way they want to be served.
Bill Pappas
The second thing is really big for us from a priority perspective, we kind of keep simplifying and modernizing our infrastructure, our ecosystem. We done a significant amount of work into that, but more needed. So over the next couple of years, we going to continue simplified when we are taking new solutions through the emerging tools and plugging them in. The third priority for us is protecting the company. I don't think there is a lot of mystery in terms of how that environment has changed. Our customers are expecting us to be able to safeguard their assets and it's the same thing across our company. So the role that cyber is playing into that, and in some cases our data governance, very, very important. The fourth thing for us is now that we enable the business, you can simplify, you can protect, how do you do all of this in a unit cost that keeps you competitive in the marketplace and making sure that you have the right workforce to be able to deliver all of that.
Bill Pappas
So a couple of highlights, especially when it comes to enable the business for us, we talked about AI. So one of the things that we are very proud is the development of the MetLife AI platform, which we call MetIQ. And MetIQ we developed by MetLife engineers leveraging leading foundational LLMs in that composite AI platform that is flexible enough from an architecture perspective to scale and deliver everything that we see in the marketplace through a multi-channel experience. And all of this it's bolted in into our cyber secure environment and it's data powered and cloud enabled. So for us, this has been a tremendous amount of work over the last year and a half that really fuels anything that we needed to do from being able to develop those new solutions to help and enable the businesses to win in the marketplace. So think about the outcome of this is anything gives us capabilities from generative AI to conversation AI to machine learning, to document digitization, to workflow automation, all of this coming in through MetIQ.
Bill Pappas
The second thing that we actually spend significant amount of time in this re-engineering our core processes. At the same time that we are looking at the technology architecture of the house, we are also looking at a big core processes that we are using to be able to service our customers. And we are re-engineering that with a high tech and high touch mindset. So those processes are claims, our service and call centers, our underwriting, our actuarial. So we have all the process owners going through and redesigning investing to redesigning those processes and using emerging tools to be able to get us at a more contemporary environment that ultimately helps us to differentiate in the marketplace. And the last thing that again, that comes in from enabling the businesses, the ability to work very closely with the business to create new products that they provide customer value.
Bill Pappas
And over the last six months we had a number of new products that we put in the market. One is Upwise that we offer a personalized recommendation to help employees select and utilize the benefits when every single year they go in and they've been asked to make the selection. It's an AI-powered machine that really helps you figure out based on your specific financial situation, what does it make sense for you to be able to choose. We introduced My Leave Navigator, which is provides tailored guidance for navigating leave management for major life events as we see across. And then we talked about embedded insurance, we talked about MetLife Xcelerator, especially outside of the US, an opportunity for us to be able to embed insurance solution in some of the core processes across the financial services.
Olivier Lafontaine
How do you find a balance between technology and human interaction to meet these customer demands? How do you stay attuned, in other words, to what your customers want?
Bill Pappas
I mean, and this is actually one of our strengths, but also I will tell you it's one of the areas that we've been very, very deliberate and for me it starts with what I call unbiased listening to customer. And this is a top priority for us. I call it the commercial orientation. Every single day you shall know what your customers are telling you and we have ways to be able to do that. We are looking at TNPS, our ability to be able to take the pulse of our customer interactions every single day. We have specific customer councils that we create across the company that we're able to bring the customer voice into our company, but also related and correlated back to our core processes. So that unbiased listening to the customer is huge. The same thing is making sure that you understand the customer environment and the trends and how much is changing.
Bill Pappas
Going back through the pandemic, think about the way our customer behavior has completely changed. So understanding those trends and understand how do we use the technology as a force multiplier to meet those customer demand is very, very important. Unbiased listening, understanding the trends and the customer and the customer evolution. And then staying very clear on priorities, making sure that you understand that all of what we do, it needs to grant it back to the priorities, which means you need to make the life of your customers a lot easier. You need to make the life of your associates easier to be able to service your customers and needs to have an impact. So that's how we thinking all the time. And then we talked about high tech, high touch, the realization that technology can be incredibly helpful, especially when it comes to the transactional nature of our interactions with our customer. But at the end of the day, the customer wants us to be there when they need us the most. So that's where the high touch coming in, that's where the empathy comes into our equation as well.
Olivier Lafontaine
Awesome. If we think about what's next, so data is a foundation for the success of all future technology implementations. So we just did at Equisoft a research study in conjunction with LIMRA and the research had some interesting findings. For example, 78% of correspondence reported data readiness as their biggest challenge to implementing AI. 46% said they were not really ready or not at all ready to implement AI and the two top areas that companies said they had challenges were implementing the strong data governance and two, managing data quality. So I'm curious to hear how would that compare to your own experience at MetLife and the challenges that you're seeing and your own approach to data and your level of data readiness?
Bill Pappas
I will agree with the findings. Nothing surprising there to be honest with you because before the data, we never talked about democratization of data. We need a data for a point-to-point solution. We never need a data at scale to fit for purpose for very emerging tools. So I think we are evolving, but to the point that you made some of the findings for us, we're focusing on three very specific areas. Number one, it goes back to what you said, data governance. It sounds very foundational, but when you look at the size and the scale, you need to be able to have a very, very deliberate focus on how do you manage data and especially the data that is critical for the business and the functions to deliver every single day. So for us, under the data governance, we leverage an industry-driven governance maturity index.
Bill Pappas
Basically a very consistent framework to be able to assess the ownership but also to assess the quality of the data that you have across the enterprise. We spend significant amount of time making sure that we have the right tools to be able to help you improve the data quality, improve and understand lineage and also cataloging it to be able to be easy to be able to figure out where the data resides. And then at the same time we put in the layer of responsible use of AI. So data governance not only needs to be ensure that we manage effectively from an ownership perspective, quality lineages, but also how do you use it and how do you use responsible. The second thing that we spend a significant amount of time is how do you actually engineering the data? There is one thing to make sure that you understand where does your data resides and what is the quality of the data.
Bill Pappas
But at the end of the day it goes back to what we talked about, what is the ultimate goal? The ultimate goal is to be able to access that data and to make it available without your line of business have to come through your team. So for us, not only are we getting all the prioritized data into those modern platforms to make sure that that is available, but also reusable APIs and framework so people will be able to access that data that you put into those modern platforms. And then as you're moving forward, how do you design your data elements for scalability, reuse, and accessibility, which we've never had to do before? So that's the second thing. So data governance, data engineering, and the last thing I believe which will be a game changer for us is the data science. And really shifting from the reporting that we are doing from utilizing the data to providing commercial insight to your line of business and make sure that they understand and they're staying ahead. It helps, data helps you not only empower what you already have but really helps you figuring out what is the new solutions that really makes sense for the customer that we need to be able to start designing.
Olivier Lafontaine
I agree. And there must be a workforce skill component to this to be able to leverage that data, use the tools that will leverage the data. So how does MetLife ensure that its workforce possess those latest skills, those new skills and capabilities to meet the demands of the changing times?
Bill Pappas
I agree. I think for me, secret sauce here is the workforce and you ensure that you have the contemporary workforce both from a skillset perspective but also from a leadership perspective to be able to manage all of this. So for us is if you take a step back, I think one of the things that has been very interesting, right now we have five generation of our workforce, which is amazing to see and you need all of those five generations to be able to understand where we are. But equally important to be able to be part of what you're trying to do as you're moving forward. And not only we have five generation in our workforce, but most likely this will be the last generation that we'll be managing human only. So we cannot go into an era that is human plus. So if I look at this, there is two things that we spending significant amount of time.
Bill Pappas
One is to make sure that we understand the skill sets that we need and making sure that we have the ability internally to be able to re-skill at scale. And if we cannot do that, also understanding the market to figure out how do you attract the skill sets that you need for the future. But on this one, well there is significant amount of worry around this. We've done it before and I remember I've been around for a long time. It's not the first time that we had to re-skill the workforce. Now that you need to re-skill it at scale and with a very different pace. The thing that I'm not hearing a lot in the industry is not only the skillset, it's the leadership skillset that we need to be able to also embed into organizations to manage where we are today. But equally important as we're moving forward.
Bill Pappas
And for me, I always talk about three things. One is critical thinking as you go through. We talked about conversion of change, we talked about this pace. It's something like we have not seen before. You have new tools, we have options, we have new playbooks, but none of AI will be able to actually give you critical thinking. So we need to make sure our leaders have enough of that critical thinking as we're moving forward. The second thing is what I call collaboration. And this is what I call people plus. We gonna quickly become an organization that we need to collaborate. But collaboration is not only across our humans, collaboration and work within the new emerging tools that we are plugging into our system. And the last but not least, I think what's incredibly important for us is to create a culture that we are comfortable to learn, relearn and unlearn, which is the most difficult thing.
Bill Pappas
Things that made us very successful in the past that it may not be the things that makes our fit for purpose right now. So yes on the skills, yes, understanding the skills and being able to really re-skill your workforce at a pace that you need. But equally important, that leadership attributes that you need to have to be able to manage the complexity of today is are very, very important. And this is from a critical thinking to the people plus and a culture that you're comfortable enough to relearn and unlearn all the time. And one of the things that Michel Khalaf, our CEO, has done very effectively made it okay that we are all learning at the same time, especially when it comes into those emerging tools. So from the CEO down to our customer advocates, this is very new. And how do you create a culture that it's okay to seek learning and it's okay not to know it yet? So we create a culture that whole learning and unlearning and also learning at the same time across layers of the organization. Very, very important. And that's how we are thinking through in MetLife as we're moving forward.
Olivier Lafontaine
That is such great unique insight. We rarely hear about the importance of bringing your leaders aboard, but that is so true. There is such an important aspect of the skills that are a little bit softer, I suppose, than hardcore technology and managers and leaders have to embrace innovation in these new technologies to be leading their team. So that's fantastic. We're getting to the end of our podcast, so perhaps if we want to wrap this conversation, I would ask what your best piece of advice would be for an exec looking to improve the effectiveness of their company's digital transformation in the era of AI and data?
Bill Pappas
I think I will say three things. Number one is the leaders of today and tomorrow, they need to have commercial mindset. And what do I mean by that is they always need to understand what they do today feeds compare and contrast to what's out there in the market. Especially as we talked about the options and the choices that you have today. You need to have that intellectual curiosity and be commercial mindset regardless where you sit in the organization. The second thing is prioritize for impact, not for activity. One of the things I found it really hard because of so many options and the velocity of what you see from a change perspective, you need to hone in into those things that really ultimately add value to the business and not kind of change that shiny object to prove that the tool is working. The tool will ultimately always works, but for what reason?
Bill Pappas
So how do you prioritize for impact and that activity? I think it's very important. And the last but not least is execution at scale with agility and discipline. And we talked a lot about agility and discipline before, but we've never talked about how do you do that at scale. And one of the things I found, and I think we all can attest to, you need to be able to understand what you're doing, understand the impact, and then being able to bring that value at scale so it will be able to change the way you're servicing your customers, creating new products for the customers or being able to change the way that our associates really operate every single day. So those are the three things that I will provide as an advice.
Olivier Lafontaine
Thank you very much, Bill Pappas, it was great to have you on the show. It was a great conversation, really liked the advice and the insights, very unique perspective as well. So very appreciated that you took the time to come here again and looking forward for hearing from you and other conversations at Insurtech Insights or other places where you'll be presenting.
Bill Pappas
Thank you so much. I enjoyed it as always and I appreciate the questions. I'll talk to you soon.
Olivier Lafontaine
Thank you.
