Anthony O' Donnell: I'm Anthony O'Donnell and this is Life Accelerated, a podcast for life insurers striving to achieve digital transformation. Mutual of Omaha, one of the most familiar and trusted names in the insurance industry, has been dedicated to helping customers protect what they care about and secure their financial future for over 115 years.
offering a comprehensive range of life insurance, health insurance and wealth products, as well as mortgage services, Mutual of Omaha is committed to innovation and customer centric solutions. Niki Manby Senior Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at Mutual of Omaha, came to the company with extensive experience in financial services and fintech.
she previously held key roles at Visa and Citi Ventures, which gained her vital experience for her current role. At Mutual of Omaha, Niki leverages her expertise to drive digital transformation, ensuring that the company remains competitive and customer focused.
Join us as Niki and I discuss Mutual of Omaha's digital transformation journey, the unique challenges and opportunities in the insurance sector, and the role of innovation and emerging technologies such as AI in shaping the future of the industry. Here's our conversation. So, Nicky, tell us about Mutual of Omaha.
Niki Manby: Well, let me start by telling you a little bit about our mission. really we are about helping our customers protect what they care about and secure a financial future. today we do that through a range of life insurance products, health insurance products, some wealth products.
You may not know that Mutual of Omaha, has a mortgage company. so we're involved in folks financing their homes. today we do it through that range, but we've got a long history, 115 years, in the protection value proposition.
Anthony O' Donnell: Tell us about your background, how you came to hold your current role at this, venerable company, this, household name, and what you expect to accomplish now that you're there.
Niki Manby: I, have a long history in financial services. I spent, over a decade at Visa where I held a number of roles, corporate strategy, new market development, had the privilege of leading a Emerging product P&L based in Singapore. So some international experience. subsequent to that, I was at Citigroup where I was the chief operating officer at Citi Ventures. that's the corporate venture capital team for Citigroup as well as the enterprise, innovation, team. So coming to Mutual of Omaha, for me was,obviously given moving from Citigroup to Mutual opportunity to work at a little bit of a smaller, company where we're over 6,500 employees, and it's really just about driving impact, driving change, and ensuring that the company has another 115 years of runway ahead of it,and can build on the success of the past.
So, it's been a real privilege to join the company.
Anthony O' Donnell: Well, I wonder if you could elaborate, a little bit on how you Came to hold the role in the interest you had in coming to a company like this with the background that you had and then we'll talk about what your agenda is in broad terms.
Niki Manby: one of the things that was really appealing to me around Mutual of Omaha just right off the bat is the strength of its brand. now I'm a little biased. I was actually born in Omaha. So for me, being here in California, Omaha resonated with me, since birth, literally. but it's no doubt that the way in which consumers. Trust the mutual of Omaha brand just is a fantastic foundation for innovation because it is really that trust that we trade on with the products and services we deliver. So that was really something that attracted me quite a bit. The second piece I'd say was the ability to. have an environment where I could take the learnings from fintech and a lot of the patterns that I'd seen in financial services that I think most would agree have slowly come to the insurance sector. that felt like a little had a little bit of inside baseball on what disruption might look like in insurance. because of the disruption that I really lived through and seen firsthand in financial services. So, that was really appealing to think I could take some of those learnings and employ them pretty quickly.
Anthony O' Donnell: yeah, when thinking about insurance systems and the classic problems that they've had, I feel that somehow there's a wild kingdom. Metaphor here somewhere, but We'll see if we get to that. so your role encompasses both strategy and innovation. How do those work together?
Niki Manby: I hope really well. That's certainly what I endeavor to do. especially during my time at Visa had the opportunity to work with the strategy teams and innovation teams of dozens and dozens of banks around the world, and everyone does it a little different. So one thing I really learned is there's not a single playbook for innovation that you can just lift and shift company to company.
It's Got to be a fit with a company's culture. and in insurance, most of our products and solutions have very long payback periods. It's a very different proposition to test and learn in insurance. So I think it's even more important for innovation to be tightly tied to corporate strategy.
It doesn't work to test and learn out on the side and then have a real immediate pathway for those learnings to be successful. be integrated into strategy. that connectedness, I think, really helps ensure that the innovation is at the service of the enterprise energy.
Anthony O' Donnell: what are some of the ways that insurance is unique? Like, how do you apply digital innovation to a life insurance company? What are some of the particular challenges you're facing now With the opportunities of digital technology and also the state of the industry.
Niki Manby: I'll first start maybe by talking about life insurance. it's very different to think about delivering a customer experience for a life insurance policy holder. People just don't want to think about life insurance every day. They don't want to think about themselves dying every day.
That's very different than a bank who has this very transactional engagement. You might think about your checking account balance every day. You might think about your credit card balance every day. So I think one of the unique challenges is how to create an experience with a policyholder that might be quite happy to say, hey, I'm going toEnsure I've got a policy, know I'm covered, but I might put that in the drawer and not think about it every day. it presents a unique challenge create a brand relationship with that consumer, who maybe doesn't want to be reminded about it every day. so that's a challenge. So how do you think about solving? some of it comes with the effort and energy that we put into ensuring that we've got a trusted brand, as I said. Mutual of Omaha is pretty unique because we've got this long heritage. but when it comes to innovation, we've got to think about the value proposition widening, perhaps more than I would think about the touch points increasing, if that makes sense, because no carrier will have a relationship with, their customer in a life insurance product the way that a bank might have with their checking account balance.
Anthony O' Donnell: Well, what do you think are some of the hot spots of innovation opportunities for insurance?
Niki Manby: Well, this comes back maybe to my point about patterns. while there are some big differences, like the one I was just describing, there are patterns that we can lift and think about. So for example, I don't know if this is true for your payment card, but, many banks offer the ability for you to toggle on and off. Your, access to your credit card. If you lose it, you might think about, Oh, I'm going to toggle that off until I find it. toggle on and off is a really interesting consumer concept. Highly, highly personalized, frankly, in a way that, your bank isn't delivering. You're at the helm of personalizing when you want your card active versus not. So I think about that for insurance, what would it look like to have a medical insurance policy, an accident insurance policy that you can turn on and off based on your activity or what you're doing? So toggle on and off is kind of an example, subscription on demand. There's a, Real, I think, opportunity for the models of delivery of insurance products, to change.
Because consumers lives have certainly changed since when these products were invented.
Anthony O' Donnell: how are some of the ways that customers are thinking differently and, and insurance companies are reaching out to them differently? You've spoken about different communications for people who are in the latter part of their life and the milestones of life have altered.
Niki Manby: Well, it's no secret. We're all consumers ourselves, and I certainly know that it's really fantastic to not have to pick up the phone every time I want to engage a brand. Being able to engage digitally is, a theme we're all familiar with. the challenge I think for companies that might have older demographics as a part of their core customer base as mutual of Omaha does where leading provider of Medicare supplement health policies. customers in some of these segments,
you know, weren't. born and raised with an iPad. they may have gotten into their own digital experiences much later in life. what I think we need to do as innovators is test our assumptions. it's not as if, the older customer set isn't engaging at all.
In fact, Facebook is real primary social media outlet for seniors to engage and communicate. with their peers, it's about finding the right pathways that are relevant, for those that might not be digitally native. in some ways, that's not too different from any company that is trying to deliver a value proposition, being really attuned to customers needs and how they behave. but I think we'll see as the demographics are shifting pretty rapidly in our country, that we will, quickly be out of his zone where individuals didn't grow up with some of these digital tools, and that will provide a lot more, opportunity for customers to be hyper-focused today.
We really need to be across channel to be able to serve those who aren't ready to communicate only digitally.
Anthony O' Donnell: Yeah. So there's change outside in the world of consumers for technological reasons. I mean, even the elderly people, you said, are using social media like, like Facebook. And of course, there needs to be a cultural shift within the enterprise. So I'm wondering, you mentioned these pathways. How do you find those pathways as a team?
How do you create a culture of innovation?
Niki Manby: I think that, as simple as this sounds, I really try to reinforce that the innovation culture starts with being really clear on what problem you're solving. again, that sounds really simple, but in my experience, a lot of companies approach innovation from a business. problem solving perspective. We'd like sales to be higher. We'd like margins to be stronger. We'd like our expenses to be lower. Those are business problems. Focusing on what customer problem we're trying to solve is really, I think the heart of a successful innovation culture. So it starts there. a couple of other key ingredients,understanding. how to build curiosity and support curiosity in an organization, is a big part of, building that innovation culture. You might hear startups talk about failing fast. And I have heard organizations try to bring that mantra inside the company. but gosh, that's hard. It's hard to tell an associate who has spent their entire career trying to have as few failures as possible. all of a sudden, Not only be comfortable with failure, but to fail pretty quickly. so I think that's tough. I, I think that one of the mantras that's maybe a little more on point for a of some heritage in size is pivoting without penalty. really getting that where you started and what you thought might change along the way. And that it's okay to pivot, and you can do that without penalty. In fact, you're probably saving the company some, downstream pain by being highly adaptive in the process. I think that's a key component of innovating within larger companies. That's, that's pretty different from innovating smaller ones.
Anthony O' Donnell: Yeah, I mean, we are talking about a culture, so it's not just a matter of solving an individual problem, but you could say a style of problem solving. And wonder how that's going. How's the organization adapting?
Niki Manby: You know, it's been fantastic to see those who have been able to get exposed to some of the concepts around a growth mindset. Really embrace it. And one of the cultural programming elements that we have at Mutual of Omaha focused specifically on innovation culture building is our Innovation Catalyst Network. what this is, is a number of representatives scattered all across the organization. Some are in business units, some are in functional units. their day job might not be innovation. They might not have innovation in their title, but they are folks who are thinking about the future. They are highly curious. They hopefully are obsessed with some customer problems. These are all characteristics of, that innovation culture that we want to build. so it goes especially well when we're able to cultivate, some mind share and some time share with those individuals. And, It can be fairly contagious. we all want to work for companies that are doing big, bold, exciting things.
And if not getting that from the company we're at, probably going to seek it out, somewhere else. And so, again, it really goes well when it's highly networked across an enterprise as opposed to Sitting in one place like an innovation team where,you know, you've got just a small group of folks thinking day in and day out about the future.
Anthony O' Donnell: so you're, talking about catalysts. So there's a kind of networking within the organization to, if I could say it this way, to evangelize innovation. It sounds as if there's an openness to this. Across the enterprise and the people understand the need for it and want to go in that direction.
I wonder if you could relate this to alignment, in the past or for a long time in insurance, we talked about the problem of alignment between the technology organization and the people in the business. And we've seen some great strides in methodology where there's more iterative improvement and far more constant regular communication between.
Different parts of the organization, different disciplines.
Niki Manby: one of the great unifiers for us across that technology and business, environment and the priorities that sometimes, can feel pretty disparate, has been the rollout of agile across the organization. we, started our agile work in then about 10 years later, 2017, really adopted the safe methodology.
And in some ways that doesn't sound like too long ago, but it's really remarkable. I think what the organization experienced when you've got our agile release trains lined up squarely against the business priorities of any of our business areas. That provides a very natural, shared playbook, not only in how you work, but how you think about the pipeline and what's coming next, which is one of the pieces that can be very overwhelming in this alignment exercise. The need for it doesn't go away. You don't set the alignment and forget it. It's highly, highly iterative and so the Agile framework is one that I think has brought most companies, most have probably adopted it at this point, really brought a lot of the, alignment of, IS and business together.
Anthony O' Donnell: So that openness and agility also applies to bringing in new technology, new ways of solving problems. And that leads me to a question of what does insure tech bring to the table? you have relevant experience with city ventures. so what did the insure tech spring and what did the established companies bring to the table, the incumbents and what makes for a good partnership between the two?
Niki Manby: Yeah. Well, first kind of unique attributes that I think we learn from each other on, you know, the startups really have no choice but to have that inherent. Obsession with the customer problem. It's their whole reason for starting up to begin with. and so that's really a, ethos, that I think big companies can learn from, pivoting fast.
Some of these things that we'd like to do as a big company, we see startups do very naturally. they need to do it because there's a scarcity of capital, that demands, that they pivot quickly. And so, while most large companies don't have that scarcity of capital as a starting place, in some ways we like to affect it because it is what drives some of the speed that we'd be looking for. now flip the tables, what does a large company, have that is somewhat elusive for startups? Of course, well known brands. those two components are the ambition of the startup who are, in some cases investing an awful lot. If there are consumer facing, how to build a brand that larger companies really enjoy the benefits of decades worth of brand building. so bringing those two things together can be really interesting, super powerful. I think, As was the case in FinTech and is the case in InsureTech, we're seeing a shift. A lot of companies that startups that began life as a B2C have shifted to become a B2B player, recognizing that they can deliver the power of their solution, get it out into the hands of customers. In case of insurance, sometimes that's employers, through the scale and brand. that is already, in place with a larger company. So I think we're seeing more and more of those partnerships,to answer another part of your question, I think that what big companies need to get good at is that integration, especially in insurance.
A lot of us, have built, in house. Uh, year over year, decade after decade, and we have a lot of legacy systems that we've invested a lot to create in house. there, I think there's real competitive advantage in how large companies can move away from the building it all mentality and partnering with these companies that will just have a level of expertise and acumen. in their zone of production that, that'll be higher, than a carrier would ever be able to do. We can't do it all. And thank goodness there's lots of folks out there to help us. What
Anthony O' Donnell: Well, let's talk about a particular technology now that everybody's talking about. A. I. N. J. N. A. I. How do you think I will impact the industry?
Niki Manby: know, I, got this question, Not too long ago, and I stand by the answer then although Anthony have me back in six months or 16 months and let's see how strong my crystal ball was I do not see generative AI Changing the insurance business model the way that generative AI is Certainly changing the business model in so many other sectors. searching today using any web browser is already a different experience as the likes of Google and others employ generative AI and they're searching. That's a real change to the business model of product. That solution. I don't see that kind of a change. In a life insurance product or health insurance product.
So for me, generative AI and insurance is less about the what, but it is absolutely about the how. And I think that is where we will see pretty radical disruption. we at mutual Omaha think about some of the early use cases. Being in the areas of underwriting, and certainly in software and engineering, where coders are just going to have, an absolutely different experience, as they're able to leverage some generative AI tools. but I think you could expect to see that most of the early use cases. We'll be internally facing, even though the promise of generative AI certainly, is exciting when you think about it, extending to customers and producers. but I don't think many in our space are there just yet. and we're all spending a lot of time thinking about governance and, the appropriate controls when we have generative AI conversations with our customers.
Anthony O' Donnell: Well, Nikki, thank you for being a guest on life accelerated.
Niki Manby: Well, thank you. mean it when I say I hope you, uh, bring me back. we can talk further about What we end up seeing in generative AI, the speed of the technology is, I think something like not many have seen, and I imagine there'll be more to follow in its footsteps.
Anthony O' Donnell: Very good. Well, I look forward to that conversation.
Niki Manby: All right. Thank you so much.
Anthony O' Donnell: Nikki addresses a need not only to meet current market demands, but also to set the stage for future advancements.
crucial to being able to meet rapid market changes is the creation of an innovation culture, which at Mutual is driven by something called the Innovation Catalyst Network. Also important is the integration of InsureTech capabilities, something Nikki knows about from her tenure at Citi Ventures.
Bringing these tools to bear in concrete innovation efforts requires agile methodology, such as Scaled Agile Framework, to guide and manage execution. Nicky was very bullish about the potential of Gen AI, saying that Mutual of Omaha sees early, internally facing use cases in underwriting and software engineering.
The company is investing a lot of energy on governance and controls, but Nicky sees a bright future when Gen AI is ready for use with customers and producers. If you would like to learn more about driving your own digital transformation, visit Equisoft. com slash Life Accelerated.
