Partners Life - Insurer Innovation Award 2024

1. The World’s
Digital Insurance
Awards 2024
Thanks for considering our Insurer Innovation Award
submission. We’re thrilled to be able to share Evince,
by Partners Life.

2. Welcome to
Evince
Making life insurance advice a conversation
through storytelling and smart data
Evince is a visual and interactive advice tool, used
with customers to help them understand their need
for insurance and value professional advice.
Evince is a single tool, with multiple user scenarios.
Parts of the experience are accessed directly by the
customer, some with the support/facilitation of an
adviser and others by the adviser only. Designing a
single tool with a variety of user scenarios made for
a unique challenge.
The World’s Digital Insurance Awards 2024
Evince provides an easy, accurate, and interactive
experience for clients. Life before Evince was paper
based with manual calculations so it would take a long
time to get recommendations back to clients. Evince
delivers on the spot analysis and client feedback is
always positive - they like how they can visualise the
impacts if disaster should strike.
Nick Blincoe, Insurance Adviser
“

3. Evince’s
place in the
value chain
— 3
Evince plays what has been
described by our Executive Team
as a ‘business critical’ role in key
moments in our value chain.
1 Awareness
The financial profiling, future projection and
scenario analysis provides customers with an
awareness of their personal risk
Evince offers a Reviews feature for customer
anniversaries, or ad-hoc changes in
circumstances, reassessing their level of cover
The World’s Digital Insurance Awards 2024
2 Consideration
3 Purchase
4 Application processing
5 Customer care
6 Claims
Tailored cover options with a dedicated
affordability function provides customers with
the ability to scale their choice of cover
1
2
5

4. Through full advice provision and contributing to financial
literacy, Evince is helping to bridge the under insurance gap in
New Zealand
Bridging the gap
There is widespread awareness of life
products among New Zealanders but only a
small number take action and consider
purchasing it.
Globally, New Zealand is one of the most
underinsured countries. Around two thirds of
Kiwis don’t have life cover - largely due to not
seeing the value in it.
The COVID-19 pandemic enhanced the overall
concern for personal health and wellbeing, but
customers are still not taking a proactive
approach to purchasing it.
The World’s Digital Insurance Awards 2024
One of the core goals with Evince is to not
only be able to provide customers with a
tailored life insurance recommendation based
on the data they’ve provided, but to also ‘take
them on that journey’, so they understand the
value of the cover.
We’ve made Evince available to all licensed
Independent Financial Advisers in New
Zealand, giving it maximum potential to truly
address the insurance gap in this market.
Source: Financial Services Council

5. Reinventing how
bancassurance is
done in NZ
When we announced the acquisition of BNZ
Life Insurance Ltd we knew we had a unique IT
challenge/opportunity: to create a new
distribution channel and help thousands of New
Zealanders, many of whom are under-insured,
get the insurance they need.
The acquisition would mean the bank would
refer its customers seeking life insurance, to
Partners Life. This created an opportunity to
offer a digital platform that could effectively
facilitate the insurance advice process between
Partners Life’s insurance advisers and
thousands of prospective customers per
month.
The World’s Digital Insurance Awards 2024
This was a perfect use case for Evince, but also
required a supportive digital journey wrapped
around the advice conversation for referred
customers.
The typical customer journey for Bancassurance
tends to be ‘limited advice’ with simple products.
However, we’ve managed to deliver a robust and
full advice process that we believe will result in
great customer outcomes at claims time.
Within its first year we saw a significant increase in
the average range and level of cover per
customer, proof that the technology-enabled
advice journey is doing its job, educating and
showing value for New Zealanders.

6. Storytelling
— 6
The reality is that life insurance is sold rather than bought. People need
to understand the value of getting insurance by showing them the long-
term impact of death and serious illness on their lives and the lives of
their families.
We’ve achieved this in Evince through storytelling functionality and
content, that takes customers on a forward-looking journey, helping
them empathise with their future selves by seeing a visual representation
of their personal risk.
The World’s Digital Insurance Awards 2024
We did this through developing some pointed design principals that not
only informed our approach to storytelling, but the entire Evince
experience:
- Be my guide. To guide the user to a life insurance package that
works for them, the digital tool needed to educate, lead, advise
and more.
- Show me how, tell me why. It isn’t enough for users to ‘just buy
life insurance’. We wanted to make them more than mere users
and turn them into advocates.
- Make me feel. To get life insurance, users need to go on a
journey. It’s an emotional one, defined by ups and downs, from
curiosity to revelation and from shock to relief.
We used storytelling as both a feature and a principal in Evince to
help customers identify with their future selves.
“
The experience is seriously engaging
- Matt Connolly, Sonr
Nick Blincoe, Insurance Adviser

8. Smart data, smart decisions
— 8
The advice engine, or the logic that drives shortfall analysis and the
insurance calculations, is really the heart of the Evince system.
This logic plays a role right through the advice journey. In the initial
fact finding process, the system provides ‘smart estimates’ for the
customer’s regular living expenses, based on things like their
address and family composition.
It’s then used to project a customer’s financial future and then
visually illustrate what their financial shortfall will look like in the
case of a serious illness or death.
The World’s Digital Insurance Awards 2024
Crucially - and this is where we see true differentiation in the market
- the logic continues to play a role in the affordability conversation,
where the level of cover may get reduced to fit the customer’s
budget. Without this, all the up-front science to the conversation is
wasted.
Evince by default proposes an ideal level of cover - referred to as
the “Maintain lifestyle” package. This is because it represents
perfect indemnification of the customer’s lost lifestyle. Their
shortfalls are represented visually as being 100% covered.
If the conversation turns to cost, as it often does, we then provide a
comparison view, where alternative packages are lined up side-by-
side. Each alternative package displays the percentage of their
shortfall that is covered – making choices feel much closer to
tangible, real-world decisions.
Evince has smart logic built in right through the advice journey to
support the adviser and provide transparency to the customer.

10. No obligation advice -
as a science
— 10
Evince is insurer agnostic, so premiums and benefit recommendations
are designed to be indicative. Exact benefit types and exact premiums
come later – and are part of the adviser executing a particular quote with
a particular insurer.
This brings value to the customer on two levels. Firstly, they’re getting
impartial recommendations, as a science, based purely on their needs,
rather than what a particular product or insurer is offering.
Secondly, that recommendation comes with no obligation to purchase
the product. If they do decide to purchase it, it’s down to the adviser to
select the most appropriate life insurance product/provider, based on the
customer’s needs and levels of affordability.
We see this as another reason why Evince is helping to empower the
customer to make the most informed choices for their level of cover. It
also takes the ‘sales’ burden off the adviser, who can focus more on the
‘advice’ part of the conversation.
Evince helps to guide customers to the right decision for their
circumstances and affordability, rather than just ‘sell’ insurance
The World’s Digital Insurance Awards 2024

12. The impact
The World’s Digital Insurance Awards 2024
We’ve seen a genuine positive impact through Evince, both in the quantitative
success its achieved, as well as the feedback we’ve had from the advisers who
have used it to facilitate their conversations with customers. Here at Partners Life,
we have now built our entire internal advice team and process around the Evince
advice journey, and this was instrumental in helping us win a referral partnership
with one of NZ's largest banks, BNZ (as referenced on page 5).
A group of advisers measured the impact of Evince on their
performance over 12 months. Here are some results:
There’s no guesswork or anything, it
removes that subjectivity around why
you’ve selected that type of cover and
that much cover. Clients also appreciate
that Evince isn’t subjective and that
builds trust in the process. Overall my
clients end up taking more cover via
Evince compared to when I wasn’t using
it and that’s simply because if they want
to make specific changes to the cover
compared to the recommended cover
presented then they can do so with
purpose and clarity, knowing where and
what situation that will leave them in from
a risk and financial vulnerability
perspective.
Jo Walker, Insurance Adviser
“