This month's note from Kieran Forde
Business UpdatesArticle9 November 2023
We have recently re-organised our business into three core customer segments being Retail, Group & General Insurance. Within our Retail segment we have pulled together the key parts of our business that impact the service we provide to our adviser partners. This adviser facing team includes; Sales, Underwriting, Case Management, Product and Pricing, and our Adviser Service teams, it also includes technology focused resources to help us continually improve our services to you. Claims is an enterprise-wide capability (sitting across the above three customer segments) and remains closely connected to our new adviser team.
To enable these changes to occur, there have also been changes to some individual roles internally:
- Nathan Taggart has moved into our business wide strategy team, this is a great career move for Nathan, he will bring a strong market focus to the strategy function, and I look forward to continuing to work closely with him. Our four Regional Managers; Vilma Attanasio (WA & SA), Matt Backman (VIC), Reece Foster (QLD) & Rob McNeill (NSW) remain unchanged and lead our local BDM teams.
- Tim Kane moves into a newly created role and leads our underwriting teams nationally. Tim is supported by four regional underwriting leaders; Leigh O’Malley (WA & SA), Elizabeth Burke (VIC), Karl Bird (QLD) & Alice Swain (NSW). Peter Tilocca our previous Chief Underwriting Officer is leaving the business, we’d like to thank Peter for his significant contribution to the success of the company and we wish him well.
- Jayne Edwards moves into a newly created role and leads our new business Case Management teams nationally. Jayne is supported by three regional case management leaders; Harry Bohl (WA & SA & Victoria), Tamara Santjohanser (QLD) and Catherine Pestana (NSW).
Our Sales, Underwriting & Case Management teams are working closely together to align adviser panels and ensure you all have the right contacts in place locally to provide the new business support you need.
- Tim Atley takes on an expanded role, in addition to being responsible for our key licensee relationships, Tim’s team is also in charge of our in-market activity and adviser education programme delivered via our ZONE platform.
- Tina Beilby is caretaking our Adviser Care teams who provide phone-based service to advisers (including Service One), looking after any manual quote calculations and all commission related work.
- Ioana Logan (Zurich) & KV Ho (OnePath) are overseeing the work of our product, proposition and pricing teams do.
The team of people above are committed to our Adviser team mission, which is “To be Australia’s leading insurer, that advisers trust, recommend and find the easiest to do business with”. You will ultimately be the judge of how we progress towards this mission. As always, we are keen to hear your feedback and are committed to keep improving what we do and how we do it.
The Adviser Portal, keeps getting better
Our adviser portal is better than ever before. With new and improved digital capabilities and a range of self-service functionality, we are helping make your business more efficient.
You can get up to date with all of our recent enhancements by visiting our dedicated portal pages > zurich.com.au/adviserportal I onepath.com.au/adviserportal.
See the latest enhancements on inforce quoting capabilities here.
Unfair Contract Terms: Continually removing ambiguity and ensuring greater transparency in our policies
It is our responsibility to ensure you and our customers have complete confidence that their policy will protect them, as it is trusted to, at difficult times. With this in mind we have made further efforts to remove ambiguity and ensure greater transparency in relation to certain policy terms and definitions.
Some of the changes we have implemented include the removal of, or updated wording to remove subjectivity and provide better clarity, making it easier to understand the terms of your cover with us.
While the changes have been made to provide better transparency to our customers, if they are inadvertently disadvantaged by any of the changes, the previous wording in the PDS will apply.
The changes will be effective for policies issued from 9 November 2023.
The updated terms can be found on our website by clicking the below links:
Do you need to take any action?
No action is required, however if you have any questions regarding these changes, please contact your BDM.
I look forward to catching up with at the FAAA Congress in a few weeks. And as always, thank you for your continued support.
Cheers,
Kieran
