Group insurance within superannuation will remain a key focus for MetLife in Australia, but the company’s Maria Morris has told Mike Taylor that it also intends leveraging its global expertise with respect to employee benefits.
When big New York-based insurer MetLife first established a formal footprint in the Australian market in 2005 via the acquisition of Citibank’s life insurance assets, its focus was almost immediately on group insurance based on the scale offered by Australia’s compulsory superannuation guarantee.
Now, some seven years down the track, while the big insurer remains well-focused on superannuation and group life insurance, it has closely examined the areas for future growth offered in the Australian market and has moved to leverage off one of its biggest product sets – employee benefits – and the delivery of new offerings into both the superannuation post-retirement domain and the human resources-based employee benefits arena.
Over the past six months MetLife has implemented a number of internal changes aimed at giving it a more global focus – and Australia is a part of that new global equation.
The direction of the company in Australia was spelled out to Super Review in New York by the company’s Executive Vice President, Global Employee Benefits, Integration, Maria Morris.
Discussing new research covering the employee benefits arena and the implications for Australia, Morris pointed out the strong rationale for the company leveraging off its global expertise and, more importantly, its strong and on-going commercial relationships with some of the world’s largest.
The essence of the strategy, according to Morris, is that MetLife is the largest employee benefits company in the word.
“We have 60 per cent of the global 1000 (companies) and the headquarters teams of those companies know our capabilities,” she said.
Morris said it made sense to leverage MetLife’s existing relationships with those companies to link with their subsidiaries in Australia.
She said MetLife had recently examined where areas of growth would occur over the next 18 months, and Australia was one of those countries via the expansion of MetLife’s employee benefits business.
“We’ll be continuing to build out product, become more competitive on superannuation funds and become a bigger player in the space,” Morris said.
However, at the heart of the MetLife approach is research. Among the most recent is work undertaken by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by MAXIS Global Benefits Network – a joint venture between MetLife and AXA.
That research has signalled the strategic direction likely to be followed by many of the world’s most significant multi-national corporates (MNCs).
And what Morris said surprised her was the finding that key MNCs would not only be targeting high-growth emerging market economies such as China, India and Brazil, but also highly developed markets, notwithstanding less than ideal conditions.
“I was somewhat surprised by the fact that what companies are deciding is that we have a global economy and that there is a plan for both mature and emerging economies in the next five years,” she said.
“I found it surprising because I thought they would be chasing the emerging economies,” Morris said.
However she said this simply underscored the reality that there existed a “global war for talent” which needed to be understood and addressed by MNCs if they wanted to pursue their strategies.
Further, she said the MNCs needed to do so on the basis of attracting and retaining the best talent in their home countries – something which stood in contrast to earlier corporate practices, including on the part of MetLife.
“In the old days we used to parachute ex-pats into local companies,” Morris said.
“You don’t get that any more; today you get local talent in the local country.”
She said the study had also served to validate that employee benefits are a lever for attracting and retaining talent.
In a number of emerging economies with younger populations, Morris believed it was not surprising that health benefits had emerged as the number two most important factor after salary in terms of attracting and retaining candidates, while retirement benefits were not rated as highly.
However this picture changed in economies with ageing populations such as Australia, where retirement benefits rated much more highly than was the case elsewhere.
Importantly, Morris said that while there might be some underlying differences from economy to economy, global themes had clearly emerged.
“What we’re seeing are global guiding principles with respect to health benefits and retirement benefits,” she said. “But the packages are local.”
