Anthony O'Donnell: I'm Anthony O'Donnell and this is Life Accelerated, a podcast for life insurers striving to achieve digital transformation. John Hancock, a household name that resonates with associations of both trust and innovation, has been dedicated to helping customers secure their futures and adapt to life's changes for over 160 years.
Known for its strong brand and customer focused offerings, John Hancock is at the forefront of promoting long, healthy lives through pioneering initiatives such as Vitality Behavioral Insurance designed to incentivize healthy living. Our guest today is Jean Olive, the firm's Chief Information Officer.
Having taken the role just about a year ago, Jean has been spearheading the company's technology evolution, focusing on infrastructure, digital strategies, and transformative innovations. In this episode, Jean and I explore John Hancock's digital transformation and how the company is driving innovation toward a frictionless and highly personalized customer experience.
We discuss the company's ambitious move to the cloud. The consolidation of its admin systems and the integration of into processes to enhance both customer and employee experiences. We discussed perspective on John Hancock's ongoing approach to using technology to foster the health wellness and longevity of its policy holders.
And also its commitment to nurturing talent and fostering a culture of continuous learning and growth. Here's our conversation.
Anthony O'Donnell: Well, Jean, welcome to Life Accelerated. It's a pleasure to have you as a guest on the show.
Jean Olive: Oh, thank you. I'm really happy to be here Anthony.
Anthony O'Donnell: I thought we'd begin with just a little discussion who John Hancock is today. It's obviously a household name company. Everybody knows the company. Everybody's heard of the signer of the, declaration of independence. But, what should we know about the company today in terms of it's a background and how it's living its mission in the modern age and what its vision is.
Jean Olive: Well, I think, John Hancock is really great. It's 160 year old company. It's so well known, especially in the, Boston area. And it really in its brand and it's the customers. and we're really focusing, you know, where the evolution has come, you know, is protecting people and, protecting families in case you have a, change in your life circumstances, whether it's being, you know, something that's term policy or if it's, needing long term care, for your loved ones or being that person impacted.
But it's really looking at like where we're evolving to is getting to this, what we call longer, healthier, better, because Americans are living longer lives. But we're not necessarily living better lives. So the back, part of our lives are impacted by not being healthy. And nobody really wants to live that way, right?
Everybody wants to, you know, live a good life and live in their home and really focusing from what your lifespan is to what your health span is. And we're doing some really amazing things in that. And really one of the things that we're. Most proud of is our vitality, behavioral insurance offering, where we really promote people to, live better, healthier lives.
We incentivize them. And it's really around the four major things that go into it. My belief, and you know, many people, believe this to better aging is really, you've got to eat well, you've got to sleep well, you've got to move, and you've got to take care of your mental health.
And we're finding more, especially as you age, that the mental health and the loneliness factor and keeping people connected, is really important. So, those are the big four. And then within the offering of Vitality, we were the first, insurer to offer GRAIL, which is a cancer blood text detection system.
And, and the impact from that is amazing. We have some really amazing customer stories that, people are getting detected, in cancers that you usually don't find until stage four, in stage one. And it's really impacting their life.
Anthony O'Donnell: Done fully to benefit the customer, there's no liability.
Jean Olive: Right. There's no liability. We don't know the results, right? the customer will share the results. Often the customer shares the results and is really advocating this. We have a recent customer and that, it's on our home page. He struggled so long and hard to get the diagnosis.
He got Grail came back and said, you have breast cancer. I mean, how many men have breast cancer? They told me they had breast cancer. His doctor didn't believe it. He sent him away. Grail followed up. How are you doing? Did you go forward? Did you have your test? And he's like, no. And they were like, you should go back to your doctor.
Went back to the doctor, had a mammogram. Nothing came up. The doctor said, well, you're okay. He's like, no, I want the ultrasound. And they found that, you know, he did have breast cancer and he has some. other issues. And now he's going through the process and, you know, he's living a longer, healthier life.
You know, he wants to be with his grandchildren. He wants to travel and the story itself is just beautiful. And there's many people out there like him. that are, you know, it's life changing. And now we've gone to the next step with, PRONUVO, which is MRI detection. And we offer, not only discounts to our customers who have the vitality behavioral insurance, we also get them in front of the line.
So it was one of the things that one of the Kardashians was out promoting. So it's pretty gone viral and everybody wants to have this test now. and, there's a whole wait list. But the deal with, if you have the John Hancock plan, you can get kicked up to the front of the line.
So just to have that peace of mind, right? And if you can detect, and get through the process a lot easier, it's beneficial for our whole economy and, you know, everyone, how can we get ahead? But it's very exciting.
Anthony O'Donnell: Yeah, interesting to see how far john Hancock has gone down this road of, the traditional focus on the policy holders mortality to a focus on the policy holders well being.
Jean Olive: Wellbeing. Yeah.
Anthony O'Donnell: So, we do like to talk about where our guests come from.
And you have a very interesting background. You were trained in engineering, but it was chemical engineering and have a very interesting resume in terms of the kinds of companies you've worked for. So, I thought you could discuss your career experience a little bit talk a little bit about how that benefits your point of view and the perspective you bring to your role as insurance CIO at John Hancock.
Jean Olive: Yeah, I've been very lucky. And I've been in five different industries and five different cultures. Which is, you know, I think you, take your, technology and your skill size with your leadership side and what I've learned from many, many great people along the way, have taught me and, based on the companies, I've been very lucky. Five companies that really have strong values, and that really, focus on the people.
But from a background perspective, as an engineer, you know, you're a problem solver. I think about like my journey and my career path over, 40 years I began my career that you had to be in the office. We had these DOS applications that, you know, we were manually typing slash slash dot dot and how technology has like just extrapolated in such a fast time.
And the ability and the flexibility now that we have being part of that whole journey from, all of a sudden, you know, sharing a desktop to having email to the web, right? And now, the web is going into AI and moving from desktops to laptops and just, the way we use technology, how we communicate, video applications, right?
And people didn't trust it and then COVID hit. Video and teams was the way we had to connect, right? We had to get out of anything that was on premise and get into to the cloud and then cloud applications. And so I think it's been an exciting journey and you can go back to so many lessons learned and what worked and didn't work and even though the technologies are very different it's still, you know, enabling technology so that we can, be easier, better, faster and no matter what technology you have you're never taking the people factor out of that.
Anthony O'Donnell: Right. So that's a vision of constant change. And I thought it would be good to kind of jump to how you got to John Hancock and where you are today. almost exactly a year since you arrived at John Hancock.
Jean Olive: A year and a couple days.
Anthony O'Donnell: How the company was when you arrived, with regard to your responsibilities and what you've been working on in this intervening year.
Jean Olive: So I think really good. Seamus Whelan is our, CIO and, he's been here five years and he came in, we talked a little about this yesterday, him and I, like it was kind of like you had to keep the lights on, we had challenges in our infrastructure and our operations and, you know, there was a very disconnect.
And so, you know, that got fixed over two years. And that was the big focus. And then we went to really like a, design and deliver and digital strategy. Once you have the foundation in place, right? How do you get the engine going? How do you start digitizing? And now we're really getting ready for the next phase of our strategy is really like innovation and real transformation.
And I think not only within our company, but you see that without outside our companies, when you think about software too, like. we used to do our own coding, right? And we did it ourselves. And then, then we, had the applications, but we'd put them in our mainframes.
And now, you know, it's software as a service and we're in clouds. And so that whole evolution, but what, you know, what brought me to, Hancock is I wasn't really looking, but it became an opportunity that I was working, really trying to enable care at home. That started through COVID and because there wasn't enough beds in the hospitals and I started, two years being at so many conferences, talking to so many physicians, talking about the challenges that exist.
And it came back to this, like, 90 percent of our spend in the U. S. goes to 10 percent of the population. And what John Hancock was doing is how can we improve the longer, healthier, better? And it like connected with me to like, this is the direction that we really need to be headed in that. How can we help people live and improve their health span versus focusing on, you know, We'll never flip it, right?
But if we can get more people to take better care of them and help them through technology, I mean, that's the exciting part, right? Now technology, there's so much information, there's so much data, there's so much now personalization that it's not about. If we can show data, if you take, and it's coming out, this is coming out of Vitality, once you hit 50 years old, if you have 5,000 steps a day, that is going to improve your health span.
And I think that's something that everybody could do. But in the past, we never had that type of data to say, if you do this, this will be an outcome. And now we have like through Vitality with millions of customers, they're seeing this and they're getting these insights to show people that this will help you. I think everybody's different, cultures are different I mean, I think how people metabolize things is very different, but the walking that's one thing and that's showing And now, you know, so many of us have our Apple watches and we become obsessed. I'm obsessed on my wheel every day and I want to hit those targets and you know set the goals higher and higher because you want to be healthy.
Anthony O'Donnell: Well, let's talk a little bit about some of the themes and initiatives on your agenda. we talked a little bit before about, maturity models and, I think you touched a little bit on the foundation, the core technology and infrastructure.
But know you also have some objectives like the, you know, the larger goal of a frictionless customer experience.
Jean Olive: I think we're doing, I mean, we're really doing some amazing thing. We're right at the tipping point. We've moved more than 80 percent of all our applications to the cloud, right? So that gives us much more flexibility and reliability our infrastructure. We significantly, we closed a major mainframe data center this year, which was a significant cost factor that we can reinvest, right?
I'm very lucky that I can keep reinvesting where we have opportunities. We're on our journey to do our last, conversion. So we had multiple admin systems and, you know, been a five year journey, but it's, complex, right?
Anthony O'Donnell: So one left.
Jean Olive: One left, one left. And it's the first the first active block. So there is a lot of concern. We're doing, you know, double downing on testing and making sure that we really are ready. We've got a great steer coast. So that's really exciting, for the organization,
Anthony O'Donnell: What kind of champagne are you?
Jean Olive: I know there will definitely be champagne. We'll definitely celebrate with the partners.
I feel really confident that we're going to have that done. You know, Q1 next year. So, that will free up some energy to do some other things. but I think we're doing a lot of work, focusing on, our customer overall experience, right?
Like, how do they have the best entry into, you know, our storefront, right? How do we make sure that it's seamless, and it's easy for them? And then I, through the whole life cycle, we're doing some really great work with customer service. And a lot of this work is we're leveraging, best in class. We have some really great best in class technologies that we're leveraging.
And they're SAS, applications. And now these applications. I'm embedding the AI in the application. So it's enabling us to do things like, when you think about a call center, and any call that comes in, that call can easily be transcribed, but then the agent would have to go, take the notes and then, put the script in.
Well, now you have scripting from the transcription that gives the call summary call summarization, right? So you're freeing up energy from call agents, which is such a stressful job in the attrition rate. It's so high on call agents. So even though you're embedding these efficiencies, you know, you're addressing your attrition rate, but you're making their life so much easier because it's extremely stressful, especially when people can't get the answers.
So, we're doing a lot more and I can, talk about later, but we're also doing a lot more on how we're enabled using generative AI to enable our agents to be more accurate in there. So you want the calls to be, faster. The answer is yes, given to them faster. They know the information as well as that there's an accuracy in that information.
There's nothing worse than trying to call.
Anthony O'Donnell: There also a dimension of consolidation of systems so that the CSRs have a better interface? They don't have to go searching around to different systems.
Jean Olive: Yeah, definitely, you know, what's the single entry path so that, you could own an annuity, you could have a life insurance policy and you could potentially even have long term care. How is that customer journey that everything is, you know, that is the digital customer leadership and that's where we're moving to go. You know, frictionless customer experience. And then we're also, looking at lot of areas that we can enable personalization so that with the information that we have on our customers that we can be ahead and offer them, you know, new opportunities that may be beneficial to them.
Anthony O'Donnell: So how is John Hancock now thinking about product development? Obviously with Vitality and related programs, you've developed some remarkably, innovative products. How are you thinking about new
Jean Olive: Yeah, and I think that, you know, for one thing, Vitality is like standard in our product offerings because, we're so passionate about it and believe so much in it. And I think what we're looking at, you know, new products that can really, going back to kind of like longer, healthier, better, and take that risk away, from our customers.
And from my side, you know, the technology side, how can we get those new products to market faster? How can we take away the waste in some of the processes, such as underwriting, right? How do we get, you know, a quick turn in the underwriting? How can we leverage AI for underwriting?
How can we have best in class underwriting solutions? Looking at where our pain points, looking at the data and looking like, where do we have issues in the whole, like, customer experience process? And what do we need to fix? Because it is more than straight through processing, right? So where are some triggers that we can have, backlogs and, use the data and automate more and more.
Anthony O'Donnell: So how are you thinking about AI more broadly? Like, where does AI fit in your digital vision? Are the opportunities that it presents? You've talked about underwriting. You've talked about customer service.
Jean Olive: I think that to me, like AI, it's such an exciting time with AI. And I think, you know, first off, I think you think about how are we enabling our employees and I'm really proud, I mean, it's really exciting the work that we're doing at John Hancock and really through Manulife, from a technology we have implemented GitHub, which is, our software co pilot.
It's a co-pilot to 2700 developers. We're seeing great results and the way that my team, you know, and I talked to my team about it. It's like, how can you do more with the same? It's not about headcount reduction, it's about enabling my team members to like, they write the code, co-pilot can coach them and like, they're the pilots, co-pilot can coach them.
And then after the code is written and then it really was seeing significant reduction in troubleshooting. Right, because nobody really wants to spend half their day troubleshooting. We're seeing a lot of reduction in troubleshooting. And then we're building off we have PowerApps, which, PowerApps is basically, you know, no code for workflows and it's getting to citizen development, right?
We're expanding, so that's a huge cultural change, right, for us, for our employees, but it's operate, you know, that technology for all, right, and we still have to follow a software development lifecycle, but, how do we get into that space, and that's something that we're going to be working in the forward, and that's going to be part of, that's part of my strategy is really, citizen development and, tech for all.
And then we have, built out our own chat MFC, which is, you know, within our environment so we can have it controlled, but it's, really excellent and that's for every employee and, you know, you can use it every day. You know, I was in a meeting the other day and there was kind of some back and forth do we really need to do quarterly planning and what's the impact and should it be 90 days?
And I just went to chat MFC and just prompted it like where's the value and you know, what's the benefit and literally in like, two seconds I had great bullet points summarizing points and I was able you know to back up, you know, my thought process, it helped me be more clear, in, presenting my point. I just cut and paste it and said, this is what I found from chat GPT to the team meeting that I was on.
So I'd really like what we're enabling our employees to do and getting that energy and a culture, from the applications that we use, we're really moving that, the big companies, you know, Adobe, Amazon, Salesforce are embedding AI. You know, SAP is doing it, AI in the applications.
So they're enabling either customer success or employee satisfaction with being ahead, ahead of, the insights are provided to you, which is really, it's great. You don't have to do that work. It's coming in part of the package. And then for use cases, we've got some really good use cases.
I really love the man in life has a very strong governance for its, AI, so which consists of, we have a head of AI for the company, and then the chief, information officer is part of that team, as well as chief data officer, and then risk and governance and HR is really like the big steering committee on how we're going to implement, AI, not only for a chat MFC for our employees, but for our use cases. So then, we rack and stack and we decide, you know, what funding and what will be implemented.
But the focus is really definitely on our customers and getting the information to our customers easier. So we've done an application that is for our sales teams that is called Genie and they can get in and they can ask questions about, certain types of policies.
You know, this is my customer, this is what they're looking for. And it will give them answers on recommendations of, you know, what to sell. And then it has more insights for the customers as well. we're doing some other use cases, like I said, underwriting. So that's probably where we're more in the earlier phase.
It's been about the past six months that we're on the use cases. We brought a lot of that to Investor day. They had a big Investor day in Manulife. It was in Hong Kong, I think, about a month and a half ago that really showcased, all the work that we're doing in AI and Manulife.
And I think it's quite impressive and it's, really well managed and controlled.
Anthony O'Donnell: Yeah, you know, we've been doing this podcast since, before chat GPT debuted in November of 2022. So we've been asking people about, where do you feel you are with AI and, I mean, everybody's still in some kind of an experimental phase and it sounds like you are, except that you've also gone on the use case stage and you know, I was thinking about what you said earlier about personalization. And so raises the question of the availability and the hygiene of data for use in AI applications. So, what are some of the challenges related to preparing the data for AI?
Jean Olive: Yeah, I mean, it's so much the biggest thing is there's so much unstructured data out there, right? And, there's also a demand that people want this information. And so what we've done is we have a strong data governance, We have a great, chief data officer. And then I have a John Hancock data officer who's a relative.
He's been here for about six months, but comes from with really great industry experience, in the consumer goods sides. We think about the amount of data, that consumer goods has. so he's really been, focusing on. the how. And so we've kicked off like a modernization track. we also have, any kind of AI is going to go into a data lake.
So you're not going to be trying to run models out of a mess of unstructured data and to get it into the data lake, you've got to clean it. and you've got to transform. So you've got to clean and transform the data. So, when you do the use cases, we want the personalization, because we all know in our systems, Mary Smith can be there five times And it can be the same Mary Smith and it happens in every company. And that's one of the things that you shortcut is the source data is never But we're not allowing that to happen. We're making sure that the source data comes out of the data lake and it's clean.
And that just enables you to be easier, better, faster. So the work is done up front. People always want it faster. But when you have the data, you can use it and it's good and it's clean. So that's very strongly governed and a good approach.
Anthony O'Donnell: Well, let's talk about people and culture. We started by talking about this, constant change that we're living through and things are moving so rapidly and part of what's happening is the technology is changing in your environment. So the skill sets needed are changing. when we think AI in particular, and how many potential applications it has and how.
We're putting technology in the hands of people. So less a technical process and more a conceptual process. So just wanted to talk about, how you get the kind of people that you need, what kind of skillsets you need, and also how you retain those employees. You talked about attrition these CSRs.
How do you bring the right people in? How do you keep them?
Jean Olive: Yeah, I think, our people are our greatest asset, right? And so I think I kind of have a build borrow buy strategy, right? You've got to take your internal talent and you've got to build it. Build that talent, right? You've got to give them opportunities to learn and to grow. You've got to have very good career conversations and so many people, like, I don't know where I want to be.
I mean where do you want to be in five years? I was a single mom. I had three kids. I have no idea. I'm just surviving day to day. Right. So having those conversations with your people and, you know, pushed to a hundred percent individual development plans, You know, and even people say I'm retiring in five years.
Why do I need one of that? Right? Cause you always want to be learning and growing and trying new things. And so if you can get a culture of learn every day and talk about your people and think about skills development and really getting that movement of talent and giving people stretch opportunities, the world today, people think a vertical growth, right?
But really it's like more lattice, right? You've got to have a lot of horizontal opportunity. And I think in my past, in my career, I never stayed in one job for more than two years. Back in the day before really strict HR processes I remember getting a call because there's no mobile phone like a call from a manager and saying Monday you have a new job. You know, you're gonna go run this big group and I'll be like, I don't have any experience and they were like, that's okay.
You know, you can do it and yeah, you do and you learn and I think stretching and you, building our talent, we need to stretch people but we got to have their back and we got to help them. Like we just can't throw them overboard and say, "Oh, go figure out how to swim."
We've got to give them the tools, the life jackets. We've got to help them. We've got to coach them and building that type of culture is really important. The other thing is, you know, borrowing talent when you don't necessarily have the skill sets. And so in some technologies, solution architects, like we've got to borrow that talent externally, and then we build it with our own internal.
And then, you know, you have a mixed model. And then you may have to go on the market, you know, like I need a really strong chief data officer and you buy. And when that talent comes in, make sure that they're also coaching and teaching. And I think you have to have that balance cause you can't buy everything.
You just really can't. And you don't want your talent not to feel engaged and exciting and you know, that there is innovation. And so setting up programs that young people can also work on. They may be working on, you know, an operational support project and that's really important, but can we give them an opportunity to potentially, you know, work on one of the newer digital transformation programs, even if it's only, you know, like 25 percent of their time.
Anthony O'Donnell: Do you find that not only the skill sets of change, but and you're competing for talent right against other industries? You've been in other industries, the work style of the younger employees is different today.
Jean Olive: Yeah, well, definitely, we're living with five generations, like that doesn't happen a lot, but I think it's, you know, it's not only generations, it's age groups you have to make sure. Especially with challenges, you know, we're very lucky, man, your life is doing very well.
We're having really great top line growth right now, but in many industries, when we don't have that top line growth, they're going to be cutting costs and they, cut in bringing in early career talent. And I think, for me, the energy and a lot of the creativity and the willingness to look and say, why are we doing this?
This way is our early career talent and nurturing them. We have a program that's called Start. And so we bring in, focusing on really on our developers and they come in. they do rotations and spending time with them and helping them learn the business and having skip levels with my peers coming in and talking to them and keeping them engaged and happy and really listening to their ideas.
That's the other thing is people want to be heard, we're finding more and more like, how do we make sure that they are heard? And that happens too often. In this like not invented here culture, you know, I remember someone saying to me we don't hire newbies. I was like, well, somebody hired you.
Anthony O'Donnell: Yeah, right.
Jean Olive: And so making sure that their voices I hear knowing that everyone, you know, you're extroverts like me, I talk to think, probably talk too much. But am I listening? Am I listening to understand versus listening to respond? Especially in a technical, field, many, you know, of our technologists, not going to speak up, but given that opportunity and cross training and you got to spend a lot of time with your talent and your people.
And if they're happy and engaged and you're connected with them, they will stay.
Anthony O'Donnell: I would imagine that the company's mission and also it's pioneering in developing a new concept of the relationship between the carrier and the policy holder makes it a little easier to engage and to give the employees the sense that they're working towards something valuable.
Jean Olive: Yeah, and I think at John Hancock, we really have that and we have that legacy, right? You have the legacy of 162 years. You have pride in the company. This company does so much, you headquartered in Boston right in the back bay in the hub of the city, there's so many like great a couple weeks ago.
My team went out and volunteered at the Yawkey food bank and they just had the best time. It was like 20 of them went and, just to like be together and know you can give back and that's an investment in the company and it keeps you engaged. And it, really, if you're happy, you're more productive and if you're happy, you're going to stay.
And I think people leave for two reasons. They don't have a good manager, they don't have opportunity. And those for us as leaders, we have to give people the skills to be good managers and we have to give them opportunities.
Anthony O'Donnell: Yeah. So I see a parallel in the cultivation or fostering of well being for the policy holders.
Jean Olive: Yes, right. I mean, you want to have the same values and the same mission and purpose for your employees that you have for your customers. And we definitely have that at John Hancock. And there is a sense of, caring, and caring about the company and caring about the people.
Anthony O'Donnell: And that seems to be a real success factor.
Well, Jean, thank you so much for being a guest on Life Accelerated.
Jean Olive: Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for having me. It was great, Anthony.
