Head of New Business Operations

Role Purpose:

The Head of New Business Operations is responsible for operational leadership, service excellence, and admin support across the New Business and Underwriting value chain – everything from the time an application reaches Chubb to when the policy is delivered to the customer. The role focuses on:

• Leading / defining the Operational Strategy to improve efficiency/effectiveness across new business and underwriting processes,
• Drive Service Excellence to ensure we operate in a cost-effective and resilient manner, meeting SLAs/KPIs, and
• Build team capability in each market

Key Responsibilities:

1. Operational Strategy (~30% focus)

• Develop and own the operational strategy for NB&UW – improving efficiency / effectiveness and bringing better customer experience and business outcomes via people / process / technology.
• Own the end-to-end process design / customer journey and be a key conduit for defining requirements and provoking change / digitization. Develop the target state flow / North Star model and provide the challenge (and ultimately requirements) around how we get there. Examples include driving eApplication, straight-through-processing, paperless communication to customers and salesforce.
• Help review change requests (as needed) to ensure clear cost benefit understanding is provided and join/lead governance forums as needed. Create / champion platform changes needed to deliver the desired outcome across the new business process.
• Identify and challenge variations around set-up and ways of working to aid improvement.

2. Service Excellence (~50% focus)

• Oversee new business / underwriting processes across face-to-face, telemarketing, and digital channels.
• Own the delivery of high-quality day-to-day service (aligned to customer & salesforce expectations) and the maturing of operational standards, insights, and quality assurance.
• Own the delivery of regular reporting against KPIs/SLAs in order to drive understanding, awareness, escalations, and actions. KPIs include: eApplication rate, Straight-through-acceptance (STA) rate, Straight-through-process, (STP) rate, Underwriter Productivity, Referral rate, Quality / error rate.
• Drive service excellence within country operations teams who provide perform the new business and underwriting activities, admin support, and payment processing along the value chain.
• Support audit point resolution and remediation as required.
• Work closely with the Chief Underwriting Officer and the Underwriting team to identify, agree, and implement actions.

3. Build Capabilities (~20% focus)

• Share operational best practice across the region in terms of operating models, process automation, process re-engineering, digitization, and offshoring.
• Ensure the foundations of roles & responsibilities plus appropriate measures exist to prompt the desired outcomes / thinking / ways of working.
• Provide convenient and value add insights around service and quality metrics and follow up to resolve issues. Produce regular reporting to stakeholders of achievements versus targets. Diagnose underperformance and implement remediation plans.
• Provide ad-hoc business analysis and project management to support change.

Plus, other duties, projects or functions assigned by the COO and relevant senior stakeholders.

As a leader of people, ensure individual team members are coached / developed and that they are equipped with the right skills and resources. Establish an environment that promotes Chubb Values, and builds high levels of motivation, morale and integrity.

Experience Required:

Essential:

• Experience in leading consumer operations teams and process improvement within retail orientated Financial Services (ideally insurance) and can demonstrate the delivery of tangible business benefits / savings.
• Strong Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and ability to network across stakeholders to get things done.
• Experience of working with and engaging others to help bring greater consistency of working.
• Excellent stakeholder management skills and experience of managing within a multi-country matrix environment. Flexible, influential style.
• Personal drive to achieve significant change in relatively short periods of time
• Professional demeanour - executive presence; ability to independently interact with leaders.
• Very Proficient in the use of MS Excel and PowerPoint.
• Process orientated, an organiser with strong planning ability and attention to detail.

Desirable:

• Minimum 10 years’ experience, inc. 5+ years leading operations and/or process improvement
• Knowledge / experience of the insurance lifecycle
• Strong presentation & story-telling skills
• Experience working with and expanding shared service centre operations (in country & offshore)
• Demonstrate flexible and innovative ways of working, with creative / out-of-the-box thinking
• Strategic thinker, proactive and solutions oriented

A successful candidate must be able to demonstrate:

• Excellent communication skills – written and verbal to internal and external stakeholders.
• Ability to decompose complex issues, find solutions and summarise.
• Passionate about business process, continuous improvement and efficiency.
• Willing to roll her/his sleeves up to get things done.
• Influence, coach, manage stakeholders to get things done and effect change quickly.
• Customer centric attitude and focus.
• Resilience - ability to adapt to/cope with change.
• Ability to multi-task in a fast-paced environment.
• Leadership – driving team members to be accountable and responsible for actions.
• Pro-active interested involvement with department objectives and service levels.
• Excellent organisational skills.
• Effective teamwork within a diverse work environment.
• Ability to manage team workload, morale, staffing issues where appropriate.
• Strong work ethic.

Qualifications:

• Tertiary qualifications
• Lean / Six-Sigma certification a plus, but experience more important.
• Project Management certifications desirable.