(Image source: Manulife.)
Digital transformation has become a byword of technological modernization in the insurance industry in recent years, but major North American life insurer Manulife’s (Toronto) effort to differentiate itself to customers and distribution partners has roots going back to 2017, when Roy Gori became the company’s CEO. Karen Leggett, Manulife’s Global Chief Marketing Officer, relates that in the following year, the company made an initial investment of C$1 billion for digital customer investments through 2022, aiming to make Manulife the most digitally customer centric company in its industry.
Roy Gori, President & CEO, Manulife.
Manulife committed another C$1 billion dollars over a three-year period from 2023 to 2025. “We are approaching essentially the last mile on that, having started the third month of the last year of the three-year roadmaps,” Leggett says. “I’m pleased to say that we’ve seen tremendous success.”
Among the metrics of that success are record transactional and relationship NPS levels, as well as setting records for straight-through processing of applications. “When we began this journey in early 2018, we had about 68 percent straight-through processing—today we are now almost 89 percent,” Leggett says. “The vast majority of our new business that submitted to the organization now is digitally submitted.”
The vast majority of Manulife’s claims are now digitally submitted, owing to a huge claims system transformation in the company’s Canadian group business, which will be completed in Q3 this year. “This will result in about 96 percent instant adjudication of all claims submitted,” Leggett says. “It will be pretty spectacular from a customer perspective.”
The company has also been investing the revamping of mobile apps and websites for a seamless customer experience.
Karen Leggett, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Manulife.
Cloud-Centric Financial Services
Manulife has made important investments in data and cloud enablement “These are the precursors of ensuring the quality and utilizability of data, which is critical because as we get more into AI and GenAI, models are only as good as the data you feed them,” Leggett says. “We are one of the most cloud-centric financial services companies.”
The company has also invested heavily in health-related and behavioral insurance improvements, particularly with regard to prevention. For example, through its John Hancock subsidiary in the U.S., Manulife offers the GRAIL multi-cancer early detection test. “We’ve saved lives,” says Leggett. “We’ve also introduced the full-body MRI in Canada.”
Manulife’s AI Journey
Adoption of AI has been an important feature of Manulife’s digital transformation, thought it goes back to 2016 with investments in a more “traditional” sort of machine learning, according to Leggett. When she joined the company in Feb. 2020, the company had no more than 70 data scientists. “Today, we have over 200 embedded across our businesses and our functions, so they can really get a sense of the organization,” she says.
During 2024 alone, Manulife’s digital transformation delivered over C$600 million in value to the organization as a result of growth absorption, cost takeout and revenue generation, Leggett relates. “We also hit all the KPIs we had set for ourselves,” she comments.
Personalization and Preventive Health Journeys
The company has detailed roadmaps through the end of 2025 and is currently developing further plans for the following two years which are due to be completed by the end of April. Manulife’s roadmaps for 2026-7 will also include augmentation of personalization across a variety of platforms, offering either a one-to-many or a one-to-one personalized approach to customers.
“We’re pivoting to the next set of roadmaps, which we’re going to shrink from three years to two years to bring even greater focus and refinement,” Leggett reports. “The focus is very much on AI-related transformation, whether by revenue generation, productivity enhancements, customer experience or advisor experience enhancements, and personalization. In the health space, we want to offer customers highly personalized health journeys with an emphasis on prevention.”