[GRTV] From infantry to insurance, protection is a common thread

Four months after stepping into Naomi Ballentyne’s shoes, new Partners Life CEO Michael Weston, says he’d be naive to say the idea of taking the company forward wasn’t a bit daunting.

Friday, July 19th 2024, 3:12PM

by Andrea Malcolm

However, the amount of time and care and consideration that she, the board and other executives gave to ease the transition, explain the history of the business and make him feel comfortable to take up the torch was incredibly helpful, he says.

Having got to know Ballentyne in the past six months, Weston they are very different people and he can only be himself.

“I’m, right from the outset, trying to make sure there’s a continuation in terms of the values and the culture which I think is core to the brand, but over time as I gain an understanding of the market I will work with the executive team to come up with - what does that next stage of growth for the company look like?”

He has spent his first three or four months externally focused, spending time with advisers who are core to the Partners Life business model, as well as getting to know regulators and key business partners and getting their insights about the business and the market.

“We’re now entering the stage where as a management team we’re putting together our thoughts about what are the opportunities in the market, how do we find those unserved needs and do we have the right capabilities in place to be able to work on that today or do we need to build it?”

He says the Partners Life culture is incredibly strong and the values such as celebrating the individual, being generous by nature, and doing the right thing are very grounded.

“They’re core to how people work and they use those decisions as a framework for how they evaluate options and decisions. What is more of a challenge is, as the business grows, how do you keep that relevant?”

Having met with many advisers Weston says he is pleasantly surprised by the customer focus and professionalism. “And that we’re in an industry where we all have to partner together. People aren’t looking at it as a zero sum game or my business versus your business. They’re looking at it as, the insurance market in New Zealand is under penetrated, how do we work together on solutions to address that? And there’s been no shortage of advice along the way.”

Having come from Asia (Weston was at Manulife based in Hong Kong and Japan for more than eight years the transition has been quite significant.

The Asia market is still an advice dominated market but most of that is captive advice. “The more mature markets do have high FA and MGA style models that they’re moving towards. But my previous employers had over 100,000 captive advisers that were on their books.

“So, I’m quite used to working with advisers but generally branded advisers. I think it’s quite nice to work with the independent financial advisers here.”

Early in his career Weston spent 12 years in the Australia defence force as an infantry officer He did his university education there and left as a captain. He remembers it fondly and says it gave him a good grounding for his later career.

“I was a part of the Australian Defence Force, defence being the operative word. A central thread between my military career and career today is protection. I also spent time in management consulting and had a lot of experience with different business models and industries but I gravitated back to those long term outcomes for society and a sense of protection.”

From the military he learned about trying to lead by example, that you should never ask people to do things you would never do yourself and teams are built on trust and communications.

”That’s something I work hard at with my own team but also as a team within the industry to solve some of these difficult and intractable problems.”

Weston says Partners Life will continue with its strong customer focus, product innovation which is based on a policy of no legacy technology and to advocate for financial literacy and access to advice. “They’re absolutely critical to our business model.

“Going forward there is a challenge around affordability at the moment and we have to continue to look at how we make our products more accessible for a wider range of Kiwis. Really thinking about it.”

He says Partners Life is also looking at how to build better feedback loops to do more listening to how customers perceive and what they get from the company’s products but also how easy they are for advisers to sell and administer.