Partners Life is the kind of company they write business school case studies about. Starting from scratch in 2010, the New Zealand life and health insurance company beat its own growth forecasts, achieved profitability within first five years and was the second-largest player in the New Zealand life insurance market in its tenth year. In 2022, it was acquired by Dai-chi Life Holdings, a Japanese insurance giant, for just shy of NZ$1 billion.
“It’s been a busy few years, that’s for sure,” says Dan Walker, Chief Operating Officer of Partners Life, speaking from the company’s bright head office in Auckland. “We’ve been on a really fast growth trajectory. There were lots of challenges along the way, as you can imagine when you grow fast, but it has outperformed everyone’s expectations.”
Partners Life was founded by a trio of NZ insurance industry veterans, Naomi Ballantyne, Chris Coon and Richard Coon. Before founding Partners Life, Naomi founded insurer Club Life, which was acquired by ING, and was also a founding employee of Sovereign Insurance. A well-known figure in New Zealand business, she was Managing Director of Partners Life until March this year.
A native of Melbourne, Dan first moved to New Zealand as a child when his father was involved in setting up TV3, the country’s first privately-owned TV channel. “We went back and forth a few times and I’ve been here for the last 30 years solid – but I still consider myself Australian,” he says, smiling.
He first crossed paths with Naomi when working at Us Advice, a New Zealand insurance brokerage that Naomi had founded. Building on his management-level experience in logistics and corporate gifting, Dan became National Sales Manager of Us Advice. In September 2011, Partners Life acquired Us Advice, bringing the businesses under one roof.
“Our stories are quite intertwined,” says Dan, recalling his early days with Partners Life. “The insurance market was ripe for disruption. We were just coming off the back of the GFC [global financial crisis] and product in the insurance market was quite flat, with not much innovation occurring. There was a real desire for something new and different.”
The insurance sector was also facing the prospect of tougher regulation in the future, opening a narrow window for any new entrant. Dan says it was “now or never” for the Partners Life founders and their timing was spot-on. ”It’s one of those stories where the stars aligned,” he says.
“In the first year, we thought we’d write about $8 million worth of business and I think we wrote well over $20 million,” he says. “We went from having 10 or 12 people to 70 or 80 in a year. We outgrew our office and had to move across the road into another office; then we outgrew that and had to rent back the old office again, for twice the price. It was amazing, scaling at that pace.”
It’s probably no coincidence that Partners Life enjoyed the kind of growth normally associated with technology ventures. The company took a technology-led approach to insurance quotation and sales, with a very deliberate policy to “avoid legacy” in its processes and systems. It was cloud-based from the outset and was the first New Zealand insurer to offer online quotations.
“Our founders and early employees had worked in multiple insurers so they knew the pain points,” says Dan. “Being able to update our rates live and move quickly became a massive competitive advantage.” Private equity groups backed Partners Life’s ambitious plans, with US investor Blackstone taking a majority stake in the fast-growing insurer.
At the end of 2020, Partners Life announced a deal to buy BNZ Life Insurance, which was owned by National Australia Bank, for NZ$290m. In the financial year to the end of March 2022, Partners Life had premium income of NZ$370 million and a workforce of almost 270 people. Dai-ichi, which has interests in 10 countries, paid NZ$980 million for Partners Life in August 2022.
“We were like a shark hunting a fish [in BNZ Life] and then an orca came up behind us and swallowed us up,” says Dan. “I remember people said to me, ‘This is a once-in-a-career moment, where you’re doing an acquisition and being acquired almost at the same time. It was busy, with increased scale and complexity, but we’ve definitely come out the other side and we’re in a good space. It’s a testament to the team.”
The deal bolstered Partners Life’s customer base and sales channel, and gave it an office in Wellington, the New Zealand capital. It now has over 300,000 ‘in-force’ customers for its products, which include life insurance, health insurance, income cover and trauma cover.
Recognised for innovation, the insurer is a long-standing user of secure communications and messaging technology from Auckland-based Konnect NET, part of Clanwilliam. With Konnect NET, Partners Life can receive and check customer health information from GPs and other healthcare professionals, in order to underwrite policies or process insurance claims, Dan explains.
“In underwriting, if we need further information on health conditions or need to obtain blood test results or a medical record, we use Konnect NET. The request goes off to the doctor and the notes come back in securely to our team. On the claims side, it is used to check or validate the basis for a claim, like confirming a diagnosis meets the criteria [for paying out on a claim].”
With 300,000-plus customers, it adds up to a large volume of correspondence flying around, so the security and robustness of the system are paramount. It certainly beats Dan’s early days at Partners Life, when the company processed claims manually, including faxing GPs for patient details and phoning doctors’ practices to follow up.
He has seen innovations in the Konnect NET system – which is used by virtually all of the approximately 5,600 GPs in New Zealand – including advances in automation and integration with Partners Life’s own system. For example, the insurer integrates a GP Lookup functionality to streamline the process when a customer is signing up or making a claim.
“With greater acceptance of technology and the emergence of AI, I think we’re entering a new phase where there are possibilities around real-time medical requests and abstracting data and being more precise,” says Dan. “As an insurer, believe it or not, less information is more. We only want material information; the rest of it just slows you down.”
Dan gives the example of a cancer patient making a health or life insurance claim. “All we want to know is the grading of the cancer and if it meets the definition of the policy. We don’t need to know your life history. From a privacy perspective, you don’t want to share information you don’t have to. Konnect NET has done a good job of making that [medical request] experience for GPs as easy as possible, which gives them more time with their patients.”
He welcomes advancements like New Zealand’s Manage My Health app, which connects patients and GPs. “It shouldn’t be revolutionary that the individual can take control of their own health management. It’s just what should happen and it’s finally moving in that direction,” he says.
That process was actually helped by the Covid-19 pandemic period, when people were more aware of their health and were also driven to do more online. “People and businesses that didn’t traditionally interact digitally, or didn’t have that capability, were forced to do so,” says Dan.
“In our industry, that is driving the ability to connect with customers differently. With traditional insurance sales, you had to get in front of the client, in their home or workplace. If I think about our insurance advisors now, more than half of them just do appointments virtually.”
Dan says that Partners Life is focused on near-term improvements in digital capability for its customers, such as digital self-service and processing. “In New Zealand, as an industry, we are quite far behind in terms of customer digital capability so that’s a real immediate focus for us,” he says.
As a young, ‘legacy-less’ company with a modern policy administration system, Partners Life should have a head start on some of its older rivals but it won’t be taking anything for granted. “The customer journey is really important, that everyone has the same standard of service and choice,” says Dan. “We’re quite passionate about that: leave no customer behind.”
Dai-ichi, meanwhile, has a track record of trusting local management at companies it acquires. Dan isn’t really expecting the pace to slow down any time soon. “There is an appetite and an expectation on us to continue to innovate and grow and accelerate. It’s a really exciting time.”
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