Jon Finkelstein: Hi, welcome to Shift, a PwC Canada podcast series. Having a strategic vision for where you're going next can be a challenge. Just saying "transformation" doesn't make it happen. And making an investment doesn't mean you'll automatically capture its full value. We're hearing firsthand from industry leaders on how they're making strategic transformations a priority. I'm your host, Jon Finkelstein, Executive Creative Director of PwC Canada.
Jon Finkelstein: Hi, and welcome to another episode of Shift. Hope everybody's doing well. Today we're talking about transformation for growth and efficiency. As everything continues to change around us, hello, and the new technologies disrupt how we live, transformation is an even hotter topic than it's ever been. So much is at stake. Organizations are super focused on integrating the organization and aligning to their strategy. Now, it's not easy. I know, I know. I know. But you know me. Difficult things are worth doing. And few know this better than my guest today, Pierre Miron. He's Executive Vice President, Chief Growth Officer, Canadian Operations at Industrial Alliance. Now, Pierre has held a number of high ranking positions at iA since 2018. He supervises all Canadian business segments, including wealth management, individual insurance, savings and retirement, group benefits and retirement solutions, global client experience, dealer services, as well as subsidies in auto and home insurance, auto finance and special projects. All this to say, Pierre, you know a thing or two because you've seen a thing or two, and that gives you a really unique perspective on these massive enterprise transformations. Pierre, welcome to Shift.
Pierre Miron: Thank you for inviting me. Very pleased to be with you this afternoon.
Jon Finkelstein: It's so good to have you here now. So, Pierre, I'd love you to share a little bit about your journey at iA. You started as CIO to CTO and now you're the Chief Growth Officer. That's huge. Tell us a little bit about that.
Pierre Miron: Yeah. Thank you. Will be pleased to describe a bit about this journey. So I joined the company back in September 2018. I got two roles at that time, Global Chief Information Officer, as well as Global Digital Strategy Officer, because we thought at that time that both were tightly coupled together. We saw that, okay, there was a need for changing a little bit that where we were providing I.T. services to all of the entire entities of the group. So that was the first time that this company hired a, what we call a global CIO. But more than that, giving the responsibility of establishing the digital strategy of the overall company to a guy like me was quite unusual. And we started to execute on this and we put together all the people coming from all the different sectors that we're in, that you described earlier, by starting to work on establishing, what will be the, let's call that the digital ambition of the company. It took us a year to get it done, while at the same time I was changing or transforming the I.T. business model in order to start delivering on that journey. So we took a year to come up with a huge investment plan because at the end of the day, when you decide to enter into a digital transformation, it would require a huge I.T. investment. There was two major things that we came up with. The first thing was catching up on an investment that we should have made earlier. Basically, modernization of business platform. And the second thing was about what would be the targets, the specific target for each business units in order to become much more digital. And we had to pick up, I would say, or to select what would be the most valuable thing that we should have done, we should do, into that digital journey.
Jon Finkelstein: I'm curious, though, when you started off, and I ask a lot of anecdotal questions or just tangential questions, when- did you think a year in planning? How did that line up to how long you thought it would take?
Pierre Miron: Yeah, to be honest, I didn't know what was the starting point. It took me a month or two to figure out the overall assessment, I would say. I came up earlier in that process of transforming the I.T. business model because I was quite sure that we needed to change the way we were providing I.T. services. So we started to transform the I.T. business model, earlier in that process, we started to invest on some specific thing that we thought that was beneficial for the company, such as improving significantly the employee experience and the anecdote related to this, we did that a year before the pandemic comes in, and guess what? We were ready to face the pandemic situation. Over the weekend, we've been able to make sure that all the employees were able to work even though they were not present at the office, because we made that investment a year before. But the most complicated part was on the client side, as opposed to doing some innovation on the employee experience side.
Jon Finkelstein: Technology plays a huge role in enterprise transformations. Pierre, you come from, I.T. Tell us a little bit about the I.T. journey and give us some insight about what you were thinking about.
Pierre Miron: Yeah, I used to say one thing. I.T. is business, business is I.T. Especially in the finance world. So yes, you're right. I.T. is a big enabler of this transformation. So when I joined the company back in 2018, we made some changes within, let's call that the I.T. posture, or the strategic direction of I.T. One of the key things that we decided to change was the notion of building software. Because we're quite good at building software. But I said to myself, “We need to become more of a system integrator as opposed to being a software builder.” The first strategy that we've changed is this notion of buy and build, reuse, buy and build in that order. “Buy,” meaning buying a piece of software as opposed to develop software internally, which was a big shift within I.T. Good adoption by the business, difficult to change the posture within I.T. That's why we changed this, this overall I.T. business model. The other thing that we've made as a huge commitment is going over to cloud for any kind of solution. Cloud first, digital first. That's quite easy to say, but quite complex to change because of the origin of this company. The payoff has been great so far about those two changes. Cloud and digital first, and reuse, buy and build. So for example, we've been using a platform that exists for 50 years, five zero, within the life insurance. So we decided to buy a generic software for all the administration of life insurance policy, which is an Oracle platform run over the cloud. We made a good decision to go over to this, but you could imagine the change that we needed to make, especially I.T. staff because they were used to build software, and tomorrow we're going to configure, as opposed to developing new software. So that's a big shift we're making. The same thing with Salesforce. The same thing with Workday and everything else. So that's why we started to work on the I.T. side in order to get ready for the business transformation, because we needed to change the I.T. posture in that sense.
Jon Finkelstein: Let's talk a little bit about your role as Chief Growth Officer and what that really means.
Pierre Miron: Coming back to this digital transformation, we saw at that time an opportunity to leverage one pillar, that was a kind of unusual for this company, that we mean client experience. One of the strengths of this company is distribution network. We see ourselves as a manufacturer of insurance products, and we sell those products through a distribution network, mainly independent distribution network. The real client for us at that time was the advisor as opposed to being the end client that buys our insurance policy. But after talking and talking and talking again and again about this, we came up with this notion of having two different customers. The first one is the division network or the advisor. And the second one is the client. So we said ourself, if we are able to leverage both, meaning being closer to the end client and at the same time continue to leverage this distribution network, we're going to win this fight. So that's basically one of the main pillars of this transformation. So one key thing that we have done is to implement a new business function that we call an umbrella function which is really to enable the client experience across a different business unit that were mostly driven by silo. That was a challenge, I would say. So that's basically one of the main thing that we came up with with this transformation. Having said that, I was the guy in the position to enable the new function by taking over the responsibility of the business units. That's why I came up with with this new role of Chief Growth Officer. So I'm not there to run each business unit independently. I'm there to implement or to leverage, if you wish, this new pillar that we've put in place which has a client experience.
Jon Finkelstein: I definitely want to talk to you about the client experience, the employee experience. And I actually love as a creative ad guy, I really like the 'invested in you.' That notion of investing in the organization, investing in the people, investing in your clients, investing in the business. It's running through the whole entire organization, which, as I said, as a creative guy I really love. And you start to give it meaning and you start to give it teeth. So as you started to bring all these pieces together, I'd love to hear your thoughts on, because I hear this a lot about the idea between centralized and integrated business models and how that impacts or changes how you can get your transformation done.
Pierre Miron: You said centralize. I will say a federated model is a bit different. The thing that we are doing right now is trying to avoid making too many changes within each business unit. The umbrella function that we're putting in place, the main function within this client experience is what we call the “growth hub”. It's a combination of people and technology that will enable as much as we can what we could call the next best action related to a transaction we've done with a customer. For example, if we sell a life insurance policy to an advisor, we're going to send out the transaction to this “growth hub”, and the “growth hub” will, with algorithmic, with data, with analytics, with A.I, will determine right away what should be the next best action and send the lead to the appropriate business unit that should process the lead. For example, in that case, we may know that this person owns a home or has a car. I'm going to send a link to the PNC division in order to see, is there an opportunity to cross-sell this customer right away. That's basically one of the main functions of this new hub that we've put in place, which is enable or leveraging as much as we can this client experience. The other thing is to enable a consistent user experience through different business unit, that work across a different business unit that we're in. Which was not the case because all the business unit were run independently prior to this change that we have made.
Jon Finkelstein: As you work through this period, I'm curious about the cultural shifts, the ramifications, the impact, the reception. Right, because we do tons of change. And how was it for you? How did the employees feel about what was happening?
Pierre Miron: Prior to go over this transformation, we sat down with the board of directors and the CEO to identify what will be the key success factor of this transformation. And one thing that we came up with was the evolution of the culture. So we made some changes prior to go over this transformation by enabling this culture of collaboration that we were looking for, by also hiring a new CHRO, if you wish, and by enabling this integrated culture within the company to allow me to go over this process. Because otherwise it would have been very difficult. And we got full support from the board and from the CEO as well, and the H.R. committee, because all these pieces were connected together, because that's not my first transformation and each time we go over a transformation, I've tried to identify what will be the key success factor of value transformation like this. And one thing that you said was enabling some aspect of the culture that was key for this transformation.
Jon Finkelstein: So when you're coming up with your KPIs, I'm curious. Did you have KPIs that were both market facing and internal facing, in terms of that? When you think about KPIs, it has both sides. It's the market facing success of the business, but also measuring and being able to think about adoption and how employees are responding and adopting the transformation, wouldn't you say?
Pierre Miron: So let's start with the employee, because that's more easy to do, I would say. So we've been monitoring on a monthly basis what we call the pulse survey to get some insight from the employee about the transformation that we were embarking on. We started to act on the feedback that we were collecting on a monthly basis to make sure that, okay, this thing about the culture will be there, right? And we did a huge amount of townhall and huge amount of presentation to explain what will be the key aspect of the target culture that we're looking for. So on one side started to work on this thing. On the other side, we did a lot of stuff, to be honest with you. But one of the key things that we came up with was an external study about the client segmentation. In order to leverage this cross-sell opportunity, we needed to see who is our customer that deals with us right now, because the angle that we had at that time was the angle coming from the advisor, because we didn't have a very specific view of who are the current customer. So some findings that were quite interesting: even though that we are targeting Gen-Z and millennial, for example, these studies showed that we were not there. So in terms of making sure that the offering versus the targeted customer was in line, we came up with this. Maybe we're not at the right place with the advisor because the advisors are selling ourselves what they know. It's not about targeting the client base that we were looking for. So one key thing was about, okay, who will be our future customer? And the other thing we've been able to define some specific KPI related to this global customer experience, such as customer lifetime value. What would be the key success factor that we're going to be monitoring along the way that we were not in the past? Okay. We were monitoring a huge amount of KPIs related to the sales activity through the distribution and was well established, to be honest with you. But on the customer side, NPS, CLV and some specific KPI has been implemented throughout this journey. And we are monitoring right now what would be, and the other thing that we're going to be doing that we don't do right now? For example, in the CLV customer lifetime value, more cross-selling, more product bundling, more pricing strategy and everything else in order to leverage this KPI. So for us, it was new KPI that we didn't have before this transformation that has been eye opener for huge amount of manager, if you wish.
Jon Finkelstein: For me, it's really interesting to think about how you've taken a holistic or integrated approach to everything in terms of how you're aligning the business, how you're thinking about your customers, how you're cross-selling across all the different offerings that you have, and also making sure that the technology supports it. When you say it like that, it sounds easy. Oh, yeah, we're just going to do all this stuff, sure, and you just basically check a box. But I'm also curious, as you thought about your target consumer and you looked at your offering, did you look at and think about what role partnerships and acquisitions might play in how you service customers and how you continue?
Pierre Miron: Yeah, that's another angle that we've been working on. So in terms of the growth strategy now, what will be the enabler down the road? Because maybe you're not aware, but we're number one in terms of life insurance policy being sold in Canada, not in terms of the size, but in terms of the volume. So that's a good strength for us. But we're not there in the PNC. We're not there on the group benefits. We're not there yet on the wealth management. So we saw the opportunity to scale a bit more our businesses. So how do we scale those businesses? That's basically the question we're trying to answer. Continue this thing about distribution, but a little bit different than what we used to do. Distribution means, okay, partnership with the independent MGA or a new distribution network. But what about business ecosystem? What about digital ecosystem, for example? How about targeting new clients that we don't have access right now to through the traditional distribution network? So we’re now working on defining this new channel. It could be physical channel or digital channel because of the investment in I.T. that we have made, we have now the ability to buy businesses or block of businesses, and integrate those block of businesses within the technology because we do have the scale capability that we didn't have in the past with the cloud, with everything that we have selected as the business platform. So scales really matter. And this cross-sell opportunity with the growth up, with everything else. Automatically when you buy a block of business, it will fall under this umbrella of the global six, and there we go. We have now an exponential capability with this process. All of these things will contribute to grow the business I would say. With the main core competency that we have in this company. So we're looking a little bit different than what we have done in the past, even though that we've been successful. It's not about being successful, it's about being there for the long run, being sustainable. But looking at the business and the different fashion than what we used to do.
Jon Finkelstein: That's awesome. From my perspective, it seems so complicated in terms of the variety of tentacles and the businesses, all the different parts of the technology. I can't even imagine how difficult that must have been actually to put all those pieces together and, manufacture support and consent and enthusiasm within the organization. Did it feel overwhelming when you started? Like, did you think that it was possible? Because it seems like such a big undertaking?
Pierre Miron: Yeah, it's a big undertaking, but it's going to be a journey. It's not going to be done over a year and we've been there for more than 125 years and we want to stay there. That's basically the thing that we are working on. We're looking for the long run. We've conducted a huge amount of study. We look at what's happening in Europe and United States to figure out, are we doing the right things about this notion of what we call 'phygital,' which is a combination of human advisors as well as digital, sophisticated digital tool. We strongly believe that will be the recipe of the future for us. We're not going to be fully digital like some company that decided to go through. We're trying to leverage as much as we can, discuss this client experience and by doing more cross-sell, cross-selling opportunity, if you wish. Being more specific about the operations that we have in front of us related to the client, it's a bit easier because I'm not there to reinvent all the business. I'm there to leverage as much as we can this client experience because we see that as a huge organic growth opportunity, if you wish.
Jon Finkelstein: I'm assuming that a lot of our listeners are in the midst of transformations as well and, what I'm hearing from you, which is actually really encouraging, is that, A: you don't have to feel like you have to rush. Things don't happen in a year. And being mindful and planning and having executive buy-in all the way down the organization is fundamental. Pierre, there's a huge difference between road mapping and strategy and planning and actually implementing transformation. You know, both sides of it. I'd love to hear a little bit more about the secrets and how you think about implementation and why that's so important.
Pierre Miron: So in terms of implementation, yeah, you talk about, you're talking about implementation, but to me, one of the key success factors in my career has been the combination of strategy and execution. Meaning that I'm not looking for the best strategy. I'm looking for the strategy that's going to be able to execute in this company. Because at the end of the day, you need to take that into consideration in order to be successful. So coming back to this cultural aspect that we've talked earlier, one of the things that we have done within the executive committee and the board of directors is our ability to debate and to me it was a key success factor to put on the table not only my vision, the vision that everyone that has contributed those workshop and defining the ambition has been put on the table and we've been able to debate and decide that's basically where we are going. To me, that was key to making sure that all my colleagues will be embarking with me in that journey. That was the first thing. Starting to create trust, starting to demonstrate our ability to execute by working together. To me, strategy and execution is key.
Jon Finkelstein: You and your colleagues basically need to be in lockstep and embrace this together. Can you elaborate a little bit more on the power of effective leadership and its importance in transformation?
Pierre Miron: Before going into that leadership role, one key thing that I suggested to do in terms of making sure that we create the alignment was to change the compensation formula. Making sure that all of us within the executive committee will be evaluated with the same criteria identity, which was not the case at the beginning of that journey. I said, I don't want to change everything. I want to make sure that what we call the strategic incentive will be the same for everyone within this group. We started to execute on that. And guess what? The year after we cascaded down to the other level of VP because all the people thought that was a good way to align ourselves in that role. So basically some key success factor to be honest with you. In terms of leadership, to me, I don't know how many times I had to communicate, communicate and communicate the vision and the strategy. I can't remember how many times I did some presentation because all those people were very busy about their day to day job. When you have a guy like me that said, okay, we need to transform, we need to change, we need to change, but why do we change? What was the case for change? So I needed to explain very often why we needed changes.
Jon Finkelstein: If things are good, people don't want to change. They're like ah, this is fine.
Pierre Miron: Yeah. In my previous job, we face a real crisis. We needed to change. In that situation, there were no crisis. The company's performing well, so why do we need to change? So we needed , we needed not only me, the CEO and the board of director, we spent a huge amount of time explaining why we are making so much changes in this company until the people, “Okay, now I get it. And I'm bargaining on this.” There was a shift, I would say, a year and a half ago about, “Okay, now I understand where you're going, you guys”, because none of those people are of the ability to understand something that is not that clear. Right? Until that is a vision, how do we translate the vision into some concrete action? And what would be the impact on me? So we needed to explain that very often, I would say. So communication has been key, to be honest with you, within that journey.
Jon Finkelstein: That doesn't surprise me at all. The whole communicate early, communicate often, be clear, be motivational, all that kind of good stuff. You're right. Because it does take some time to get people to really latch on to what it is you're trying to do and honestly, what's in it for them. And being able to articulate that is super important as well. What's the future for Industrial Alliance look like? What kind of key priorities are you looking at as you continue to grow?
Pierre Miron: So one of the things that we've done is to change the way we were making priorities within that company. We are entering into the second strategic plan in this company. We have fixed some of the business processes that were required to speed up this transformation, such as a priority mechanism, the compensation formula, our ability to execute and so on, and the level of adoption has increased significantly. For example, at the beginning when we came up with this global six function, a lot of people, “Pierre, we don't need that. We've been able to execute without that. Why, why, why do we need to implement?” But we got some insights from, from another company that has gone through the same kind of transformation. And the CEO said, okay, once you start executing on this, once the people will see the benefits, there will be no return back. And here we go. Now we have entry into there is no return back. So that's the kind of thing that we have seen so far. So coming back to your question, we're trying now to speed up some of the key initiatives in order to demonstrate the benefits out of these initiatives. So we have selected a specific number of initiative within the overall portfolio of initiative that will be key for enabling more quickly the transformation or the benefit of this transformation. And we are executing more and more on these things.
Jon Finkelstein: It never stops either.
Pierre Miron: And a quick anecdote, if you wish, on this. After the first three months of this, I personally came up with this overall assessment of the investment that we had to make. And the CEO said to me, “Pierre, are you serious?” I said, “Hmm, I think so.” And guess what? Once done, we're going to continue to invest heavily on I.T. And that's basically what's happening right now after five years. So we're going to continue to invest heavily within I.T. because we strongly believe that the future is there. And we believe also that we have a huge opportunity in front of us, not only organically, but inorganically as well.
Jon Finkelstein: It's interesting that the way you describe it, it's like transformation isn't something that you do. It's a way of being in a way, isn't it, because you're always in a state of transformation. It's just a way of thinking about your approach to the business, the approach to the people, the approach to technology. It's always in flux. We're already at the end of the podcast. It's unfathomable. There's so much to take in Pierre, such a complicated but also really inspiring transformation that you've done at iA and given us a really holistic look at all the ins and outs between the people, the technology, the business case, making sure leadership is on board, all of it. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us.
Pierre Miron: Thank you for inviting me. I appreciate it.
Jon Finkelstein: And I reserve, hopefully, the ability to call you back at a later date because I feel like we just started to scratch the surface of where things are at Industrial Alliance and where things are going. I have a feeling that in very short time we can be checking back with you to hear even more incredible stuff. Thanks again for being on Shift.
Jon Finkelstein: Thanks for listening to this episode of Shift, a PwC Canada podcast series. If you've enjoyed this episode and want to hear more, you can subscribe to Shift on Spotify, Apple, or Google podcasting platforms. You can find more details at PwC dot com slash ca slash shift. Just so you know, this podcast has been prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, an Ontario Limited liability partnership for general guidance on matters of interest only and does not constitute professional advice. Until next time.
