5 Questions: MetLife global tech and operations head Bill Pappas

April 5, 2022 7:00 AM

Bill Pappas is EVP and head of global technology and operations for MetLife. He joined in 2019 from Bank of America, where he was head of operations for the consumer, small business, wealth management and private banking businesses, as well as CIO for wholesale. He spoke to Digital Insurance in April 2022. Following is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation.

What drew you to the insurance industry after working in banking? While similar, the industries have unique challenges.

Bill Pappas, MetLife

MetLife

What made a difference is when I got a call from the CEO [Michel Khalaf], and he talked to me about the strategy and the purpose of the company. He said, “We’re putting the customer at the center of everything that we do. The customer is our North Star.” And he wanted my view of how the combined technology and operation function can really activate MetLife’s strategy. It gives me an opportunity to be able to service the customer the way they want to be serviced. And right now our customers, especially over the past couple of years, have been very clear that they want the best experience that they had, just like the last time [they were interacting with a company]. And that may not happen to be an insurance carrier. We had to open up our ability to be very thoughtful on how we service the customer in ways that they had been served last.

That strategy is activated by our purpose: Always be there for the customer and activate that promise to help them navigate throughout their lifetime. So you think about our technology teams that are here that serve customer experience.The infrastructure teams that are setting the resilience levels for those experiences, the cyber security and data teams that protect our customer assets. And then we have our service teams that are there to answer every single question that the customer has. Then the operations team processing those claims. So I look at all of this holistically, and we are able collectively to make decisions that bring the entire customer life cycle to life.

Shortly after you started, the COVID-19 pandemic upended the business world. How did you adjust to the upheaval?

We put 99% of our workforce on work-from-home. So it actually helped me onboard [staff] really fast across 40 different countries without even getting on a plane. But it was an onboarding plan that I have never done before. Now, how does a business execute while meeting virtually? I needed to protect the company and ensure that the company's able to, with size and scale, be able to flawlessly execute what we already have promised the customers.

We started paying very close attention to how our customer preferences are changing. Obviously through the pandemic, everybody talked a lot about more digitization, and the ability to be able to do business with the customers in a way that was very different from what it was. Insurance is really people to people. So we spent time understanding and getting the insight from our associates and customers of how those preferences are changing. We were able to accelerate our digital agenda.

A lot of the feedback that we were getting from both associates and customers was, “how do I make sure, through these very turbulent times, that I understand how to effectively manage my finances?” So we launched what we call Upwise. It’s a digital solution with a focus on building positive financial habits. We focus on the emotional first and the dollar second. We also launched our pet digital solution in this time.

You refer to insurance as a 'person-to-person' business. How do you try to preserve that human touch amid digital transformation?

Well, as I said, we are paying very close attention to trends from a customer perspective. We call [our approach] high tech and high touch, because that takes into account the very clear feedback that we're getting from our customers – that they want digital solutions to take the transactional nature from our relationship away from me in a way that is intuitive and secure, but they want us to be there when it matters the most. And that can be through the agent, that can be through our customer care associate. In some cases we are B-to-B, in some cases we’re B-to-B-to-C. We will digitize mostly the transactional nature of [the product], but we do want to safeguard that ability [for a person] to be there for the customers where that matters the most, either through selling and educating our customers about our product, or when they have a service or a question, or they're going through something that is complex.

Insurers aren't immune from the 'great resignation' and workforce tightness. How are you tackling the talent challenge?

Investing in talent is our No. 1 priority. And it is not only talent that understands digital, for me, it's talent that understands and has domain expertise enough to understand how we make money. We bring in talent from the insurance industry, well known talent for the specific domain, and we develop talent within. So it's not that I need one skillset. I think the value proposition is how we as a technology and operational organization are embedded in the business.

We are not tech for the sake of technology. We're not doing data for the sake of doing data. We're not doing cyber for the sake of doing cyber. We need leaders to be able to have all those capabilities that we just talked about, but also being embedded and activate that customer promise. We spend time on what type of training that you need, domain training and expertise. But also what it takes to lead today is incredibly different from what it was even 12 months ago. We have learned over the last couple of years that dollars are dollars, but people want to feel that they're belonging to a company, that there is a greater good out there. So our culture is built around D&I as part of what we do.

What's your perspective on the insurtech phenomenon?

I am very deliberately trying to keep my team away from chasing the next shining object, but that does not mean that we are not in tune on what is happening in the market. We look at that three different ways. One is as MetLife through our investment management, we are looking at the ecosystem and making a decision where we want to invest in.

The second is that we are looking at some of those insurtechs in terms of, “can that be part of our systems and can they scale?” We’ve brought some businesses because of that – legal is one, and the pet product. Those are smaller businesses that we can scale them into something else.

The third thing that we're doing is [evaluating] if we are competing. We want to make sure that we have a very good kind of indication of where we need to double down and compete.

Any final thoughts?

I always want to finish with what I say when people ask me, “how does it feel to work for a company that's been around 154 years?” We operate in more than 40 different countries in four different regions. We had proven the ability to reinvent ourselves on an ongoing basis. In some cases, we have been battle-tested multiple times, and we have always been part of the communities that we have served. All those advantages give MetLife its purpose, and confidence, that we can remain contemporary and relevant to our customer lives now more than ever. So I think that's an advantage for us to really activate MetLife and help us be competitive in the marketplace.