Designing Chubb Life's future with Advisers front and centre
Damien Leng is just a month into his role as Chubb Life's new Chief Innovation Officer, and he's already clear on one thing: the best solutions don't come from a whiteboard in head office.
"Advisers are the core part of our business. They are the reason we have grown to where we are," he says. "So a big part of how I want to run things from an innovation standpoint is to go more ‘outside in’. I'm keen to get our designers out talking to advisers and understanding where the real problems are, so we're actually solving the right things."
That approach has a name: design thinking. It’s a discipline Damien has been practicing for nearly 15 years. At ASB, he set up human-centred design teams that would head into bank branches, intercept customers in the banking hall, and ask them directly what wasn't working. At consultancy Assurity, he helped clients develop solutions by digging into customer problems first-hand before a single line of code was written.
"The principle is simple," he says. "Spend more time on the problem, and the solution becomes really easy.” That's the mindset he's bringing to Chubb Life. Two weeks after starting, he onboarded a Head of Design & Digital, and his team is now building out that capability. The intent is to co-design Chubb's future systems with the people who rely on them most.
For Advisers specifically, Damien has one clear goal: free up their time. After spending the past month talking to advisers, a pattern has quickly emerged.
"It seems like an awful lot of adviser effort is happening in the existing business space. That's great - those customer conversations matter. But if it takes a huge amount of effort at our end for a customer we already have, we need to ask ourselves why we're making life so difficult. I want to give advisers that time back, so they can spend more of it with customers."
More broadly, Damien describes his role using an America’s Cup sailing analogy. He sees IFAs and Chubb life teams as the race boat, and himself as part of the shore crew. While he’s not driving the boat, he’s working to find every marginal gain that makes it more efficient. His yardstick for any innovation is “will it make the boat go faster?” For IFAs, the translation is equally direct: “will it make their lives easier?”
Away from the office, Damien lives in Westmere with his three children, aged 10, 13 and 15, who take up most of his spare time. He's enjoying learning guitar alongside his son, and he’s also a part-time potter, a hobby that happily takes him away from the computer screen.
“The bowls I try to make are awful! But it's a design outlet for someone who works at a desk all day. I'm an old fellow now trying to learn some new tricks," he laughs. "But that's kind of the point. You've got to keep questioning your assumptions and stay curious, in life, and in work."
