Putting the ‘life’ in life insurance — With John Hancock CEO Brooks Tingle

Although he’s only ever worked for one insurance company, John Hancock’s recently named president and CEO, Brooks Tingle, has wide-ranging experience, from being on the front lines of the insurance business to leading marketing and strategy and operations, and now
attaining the top leadership position.

One of Tingle’s goals is to marry all the upside that comes with being a 160-plus-year-old company with the best of the modern digital economy.

As part of rethinking the business, Tingle led the company to implement its groundbreaking behavioral insurance solution, John Hancock Vitality, which helps life insurance customers earn savings and rewards for taking steps toward living longer, healthier lives.

“In the modern digital economy,” he said, “offering a product that is no fun at all to own and really hard to buy is not a winning formula.”

In this interview with Publisher Paul Feldman, Tingle talks about his journey to becoming president and CEO of John Hancock and his vision for the company’s future.

Paul Feldman: I want to congratulate you on 100 days as president and CEO of John Hancock. Tell us about your journey.

Brooks Tingle: My journey has probably been a little bit different than that of many people these days. I’ve only worked for one brand my whole career, and that brand is John Hancock. Now I joke that I’ve worked for two very different companies, because Manulife acquired John Hancock in 2004. And we have certainly become a different company.

I started with John Hancock very, very early in my career, almost right out of school, right on the front lines. And those times were invaluable in terms of working with customers, working with agents and advisors every day on operations and customer service issues. I ran our operation’s group claims, call centers, premium and billing. Ultimately, I led IT as it related to those areas and then moved into other functions. But those early years — working directly with our customers, directly with advisors — are years that I wouldn’t change for anything.

Feldman: Tell us about your experience working with advisors. How does that inform your role as president and CEO today?

Tingle: I’ve always had a great affinity for our distributors, the folks who bring our solutions to life with customers. And one of the first jobs I had was handling agent commissions. If you want to learn about the business, handle commissions. Obviously, it’s essential that we provide the customer with great value and great service. But early on, I learned to recognize the importance of providing our distribution partners with the same great value and great service.

Feldman: John Hancock has been a pioneer in technology and product development, and I know that you played an important role in the John Hancock Vitality program. Tell us a little bit about that and how that works for you as a company.

Tingle: One of the things that most excites me about leading John Hancock is the ability to marry all the upside that comes with being a 160-plus-year-old company — financial strength, trustworthiness, experience, expertise, reliability, resilience — with the best of the modern digital economy. That’s what makes John Hancock special and what I plan to accelerate under my leadership. We’ll bring all that strength, all that foundational expertise, and pair it with innovative, strategic thinking.

In many ways, let’s act like we’re starting anew. If we were building new life insurance solutions today, how would they be different than what they’ve looked like for the past 100-plus years? I think the first thing any insurer would do if they were starting from scratch is say, “Gosh, it’s a really good thing for us and our customers if they live longer and healthier.” Rather than just hope for that, I think any reasonable insurer would try to engage their customers and help achieve that outcome. And that’s what we started doing several years ago with John Hancock Vitality.

The other thing I think you would say is if you were starting fresh today with a life insurance company, you would be far more digitally enabled than our industry has been. I would say our industry collectively has been a laggard as it relates to the modern digital economy. Think about all the experiences we have as consumers today. Things are more personalized, and they’re more engaging. You hear more from a company in a way that’s unique and relevant to you.
Yet in the life insurance industry, we generally still issue policies — we send somebody a stack of paper, and they tuck it away. Somebody hears from their insurance company once or twice a year, when they get a bill or a privacy notice. And we know those privacy notices aren’t the most exciting.

So, we’re trying to turn that upside down. Just as a matter of values and convictions, at John Hancock we try to help our customers live a longer, healthier, better life. And in doing so, we’ve transformed the business. While our industry typically has one or two interactions a year with customers, we’re now interacting with our customers 20 to 30 times a month.

Feldman: That’s impressive. What types of interactions are those?

Tingle: We send them content about wellness, and they play wellness-related games as they earn points for doing things that correlate with longevity. And we’ve been able to build on that platform. We started with a heavy emphasis on physical activity, then we added a healthy food component to it. Many of us, including myself, have learned you can’t exercise your way to good health at a certain age. Nutrition really matters.

We’re showing up in our customers’ everyday lives. We started with physical activity, offering people a wearable device, and then added nutrition. And now in sort of a marketer’s dream, our customers can get a 25% discount on fresh produce purchases at more than 17,000 grocery stores nationwide. And when they make the purchase, they get a receipt that says “$5 bag of apples minus $1.25, John Hancock Vitality.”

We spun that forward during COVID-19. We were able to respond far more effectively than any traditional insurer could have, offering people points for getting the COVID-19 vaccine. We held a virtual 5K run and offered all sorts of relevant specialized education around COVID-19.
Most recently, we’ve been able to bring onto the platform something from a company called GRAIL — the Galleri multicancer test, which is what’s called a liquid biopsy. Through a simple blood sample, they can detect the presence of more than 50 types of cancer. We’ve now had several customers and an advisor who have learned that they have cancer by virtue of taking this test, offered through their John Hancock Vitality membership.

So, when you think about that as a life insurer, it’s great for the customer, which we deeply value, but also good for us.

Feldman: As part of your many roles in this industry, you’ve been involved in the sales process. How has the sales process changed in recent years?

Tingle: It’s changed a lot. There have been a lot of trends. There are certain things that are still truisms about our business. For example, “Life insurance is sold, not bought.” And that’s not because it’s not a remarkably valuable and important product, which it is. I think it’s because it’s complicated to buy and not a topic that people like to think about a lot.

Generally, a sale occurs because a conversation — human contact — has occurred. All the prognostications that I heard throughout most of my career about direct-to-consumer being the way of the future have been dramatically overstated. We’ve tried direct-to-consumer ourselves. It’s very, very difficult.

Now, that’s not to say that distribution isn’t evolving and doesn’t need to evolve. But I don’t think direct-to-consumer sales is the answer or the only winning formula.

We do need to bring much more digital enablement to the traditional advisor-involved selling methods to make the activities of the advisor far more efficient, their offices far more efficient, the inner workings of underwriting and issuing of a policy far more efficient.

To me, bringing some of those digital capabilities that might have existed in a direct-to-consumer world to the advisor space is the winning formula. We’ve seen some interesting things with spikes in demand for life insurance during COVID-19 and coming out of COVID-19. But I would say it is still very much an advisor-driven process.

I give a lot of credit to some of these insurtechs that are trying to reach consumers digitally, because I think, just due to economics, the advisor in the business tends to gravitate toward the upper end of the market.

And while COVID-19 proved many things, it certainly proved that our industry must do a better job serving all Americans, not just the wealthier among us. And we must figure out a way to help distribution.

Feldman: I think a lot of companies simply want to perform well on spreadsheets. I recently went through an underwriting process, and it was very time-consuming — it took three months to schedule my medical examination.

Tingle: You’re absolutely right about spreadsheets — and I understand why spreadsheeting occurs. I understand for certain size policies, you can only spend so much time doing all these detailed comparisons.

I do think to ultimately serve customers best, you must look at value versus just price on a spreadsheet. If you’re one of those customers who found out they have cancer well before they otherwise would have because they happened to have a John Hancock life insurance policy and had access to the Galleri test, what value do you put on that? How does that show up in a spreadsheet?

I do think we must go beyond a position on a spreadsheet. People used to ask me if I was worried about Amazon or Google getting into the insurance business. I don’t think those companies ever had or do have a desire to be in our business, but you’d have to be super naive not to realize that they’re disrupting our business in different ways.

One simple way that Amazon has disrupted our business is by changing consumers’ expectations about what it should take to buy something in the year 2023. Amazon’s famous one-click buying process informs people’s perception of how easy it should be to purchase something.

If somebody lives in a one-click world and then they go to buy life insurance, they’re like, “Wait a minute — you have to send somebody to my house to have me stand on a scale and take my blood, then I‘ve got to wait however many weeks or months?”

We — and, frankly, most in the industry — are investing a great deal in ways to make it easier and faster for more Americans to acquire the life insurance they need, such as by leveraging electronic health records, and we’ll see what artificial intelligence can ultimately do there.

But we must make life insurance not only more valuable and enjoyable to own, like what we’ve done with Vitality, but a heck of a lot easier to buy. Because in the modern digital economy, offering a product that is no fun at all to own and really hard to buy is not a winning formula.

Feldman: We’re at a point where 10,000 people are retiring every day. With inflation, where do you see the growth in the market? What are the challenges?

Tingle: One of the challenges is how the insurance industry can serve all U.S. consumers better. How do we reach more people, especially those who are in different income strata?

This goal is challenging, particularly with inflation having been what it’s been the past year or two. If you’re a young family and gas prices rise so that now it costs $80 to fill your gas tank instead of $50, or the weekly trip to the grocery store is $300 instead of $200, you might want life insurance — but do you have the budget for it?

We compared retail gas prices at the pump to life insurance applications of $500,000 and below, and you’ll never see something more perfectly correlated: When gas prices went up, life insurance applications went down.

We must get really creative on how to reach more people with easy solutions, affordable solutions, but still with that element of advice that people need from an advisor.

Feldman: COVID-19 also led to some changes in the workforce, especially with work-at-home policies. Do you see that changing?

Tingle: We have a number of people who are full-time remote. They might be underwriters, for example, or in other roles, such as individual contributors. Those who traditionally would’ve come into the office, by and large, are now hybrid. Currently, those hybrid colleagues come in the office Tuesday and Wednesday of each week, and then they work remotely the other three days of the week.

I don’t think remote policies are going to change radically in the next few years.

Feldman: Technology continues to be a game changer. AI is huge right now. Some people are scared of where this technology might lead us. Do you think we should be afraid of it, or do you think that it’s going to enhance our productivity?

Tingle: I think in every disruptive time, disruptive technology creates enormous opportunities. I’ll talk to teams of people who perform a certain job that say, “I think this job ultimately might be able to be done through an AI solution.” I’ve said, “Maybe. We’ll see. But what a great opportunity for you to embrace that and become the person that helps the company figure out how to apply AI to, say, claims payments.”

I’m generally excited about it. AI is not going to go away, so how do we harness the power of AI for good outcomes for our colleagues and customers?

Feldman: As president and CEO of John Hancock, what kind of legacy do you want to leave?

Tingle: We want John Hancock to be a company that has a profoundly positive impact on our customers’ lives. Our mission is to help people live longer, healthier, better lives. It’s motivating for our teams. I hope our advisors are inspired by it. And it makes sense to customers.

I would challenge you to find a person who doesn’t understand why their life insurance company would want them to live a longer, healthier life.

Paul Feldman started the website InsuranceNewsNet in 1999, followed by InsuranceNewsNet Magazine in 2008. Paul was a third-generation insurance agent before venturing into the media business. Paul won the 2012 Integrated Marketing Award (IMA) for Lead Gen Initiative for his Truth about Agent Recruiting video and was the runner-up for IMA's Marketer of the Year, a competition that includes consumer and B2B publishing companies. Find out more about Paul at www.paulfeldman.com.