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At Honan, we’re big believers in growing an exceptional brand, business and reputation through exceptional people. People with market-leading expertise, proven results and a fierce commitment to serving their clients, but also people with creative, considered points of view and a willingness to share them. These are our challenger champions - the ones who progress, lead and succeed by doing things a little differently, delivering on promise, and proving their passion through outstanding performance. In this series, we get to know them a little better; picking their brains for exclusive industry/category insights, future predictions, and the secrets behind their success.
It’s a cliché but true, I fell into insurance by accident. I was working in Essex, UK running a golf course when I decided to have a complete career change and become an accountant. It was a career pivot before that was even a thing. I took several short-term junior accounting roles until I landed a three-month contract at the Lloyd’s of London Syndicate Beazley. After that short taste of insurance, I was hooked and ended up staying there in various roles for almost 6 years. I moved to another Lloyd’s of London Syndicate MS Amlin for another three years before returning to Australia and taking up my role at Honan.
My colleagues like to joke that I wear many different hats, but it’s true. As an operations person with a strong insurance background in a high-paced and extremely busy insurance broking division, there’s no such thing as “that’s not my job”. In any given day I could be processing a renewal, running data extracts and reporting, mentoring the junior staff, working on tech projects, trouble shooting escalations from clients, onboarding new clients, resolving a system bug, or literally anything else that may come up.
When I joined Honan over three years ago, there was an acknowledgment that more could be done with our data. I was given the keys to the castle and asked to come up with solutions. Strata is a high volume, high touch business, so any small efficiency that can be built into the process of data gathering and transfer between the client, Honan brokers and the insurers benefits our clients.
Our grand project and an innovation I am incredibly proud of is our strata client portal. This portal aims to be 100% client-focused and it’s designed to be a one-stop shop for them. It has almost everything they need, including claims management, self-service Certificate of Currency (CoC) retrieval, endorsement requests, invoices, insurance information transfer (limits and COPE), policy documents as well as instant access to training and thought leadership resources.
With this data-driven solution our clients will receive their strata renewals, endorsements, and advice much faster and therefore they can pass this on to their clients who own and/or live in the insured properties.
As one of the biggest Strata brokers in Australia, we have a huge role to play in shaping the way the industry thinks and operates when it comes to data analytics and I’m extremely proud of the team for coming so far with our new client portal.
At Honan, we’ve made significant investments in proprietary technology-driven solutions to support more favourable outcomes for our clients as this has been a key part of our growth strategy. Some examples are the use of AI technologies like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to perform high volume, repetitive tasks and Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) to extract and share data with our insurance partners. We are also exploring the use of emerging technologies like ChatGPT to understand the possible applications within the insurance industry and keeping a critical eye on the output. I’m proud to say that we are ahead of the curve in many areas, especially because the Strata insurance industry can be a bit behind the times.
It would be great to receive fewer e-mails and fewer PDFs. We send and receive over 2 million e-mails every year and 500 thousand of these contain PDFs that need to be opened, digested and then stored. It’s very cumbersome and the industry needs to find ways of getting around this to improve efficiency.
I’m very excited by the e-mail and pdf reading software we are incorporating into our processes. As I said, in Strata alone we have received over 500 thousand emails from insurers this year and the software we are implementing skims those e-mails and their attachments. It automatically extracts the data we need, enters it into our various data warehouses, flags any discrepancies and then does the filing for us. It will free up huge amounts of time for our brokers and allows them to focus on doing what they do best: working closely with our clients and insurers to achieve the best possible results.
I only need two words – still thriving.
Managing a large team, I try to be very approachable and adaptable as a leader. It’s fantastic seeing the team learn and develop new skills in their chosen insurance specialty. As I mentioned earlier, there’s no such thing as “that’s not my job” and that applies to leading too. I help the team with anything they need or point them in the right direction. I have a minimalist philosophy to meetings, so we do very few of them, unless they are necessary. Before booking a meeting I always ask myself: could this meeting be an e-mail, Teams message, SharePoint post, Loom recording, or is there any other way of getting the message across? With so many people, so many different learning styles, and so much technology available to us it doesn’t make sense to keep doing things the old way just because that’s how we’ve always done it.'
My fiancé Michelle. She inspires me every day by managing to run her own business with her business partner that they started from scratch, parenting two beautiful children including a three-month-old, and by being a boss of all she wants to achieve in life. She’s the president of her professional association and a long-time mentor and consultant to many people within her industry. And she does all of this with unrelenting positivity and a happy, smiling approach to life.
