AI, with a human touch

Ken Lau
MD, Greater China / CEO, Hong Kong
FWD Group

How did AI become a centerpiece of FWD's corporate strategy?

Our company vision is to change the way people feel about insurance. We think AI is a very promising technology that can empower our agents while improving the customer experience across underwriting, servicing, claims — the whole customer journey. We are very positive about embracing AI.

FWD offers a comprehensive range of insurance products, from life protection to wealth accumulation. Do you foresee AI agents assuming an advisory role for your clients?

I think it depends on the customer segment and the product the customer is purchasing.

For mass-market customers buying simple protection products that are easy to explain, AI advisory is possible. This is something we're already doing. We're selling life insurance products online, digitally. If there is an AI chatbot on the digital platform, it helps customers better understand the product and helps get them onboard. That type of AI advisory is very useful.

Wealth accumulation products are more complicated. They're different from mutual funds because we provide guaranteed returns. Customers need to understand both the guaranteed and non-guaranteed elements. From the regulator's perspective, there are also requirements for financial analysis and face-to-face selling of these higher-end products.

For that segment, AI advisory can empower agents during face-to-face interactions. But it is different from a direct channel, where customers are basically doing everything themselves. For high-end products, we still need human advisors, but they can be empowered by AI.

Looking ahead, what are you hoping to accomplish at FWD?

We would like to reach a broader base of customers in the mass market with simple products. We'd like AI technology to help us better support customer onboarding, so customers can understand even simple products more easily.

On the wealth accumulation side, we'd also like AI to help us provide better underwriting. For high-value customers, we have extensive Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) requirements. We'd like AI to support the manual process while keeping humans in the loop. AI can collect information beforehand and pass it to our people to make the final decision.

Improving operational efficiency in this way could also benefit our higher-end wealth accumulation products, where the dollar amounts involved are often quite significant.

If you could redesign one aspect of the customer experience from scratch, what would it be?

What interests me most is the call center. If we could better understand why customers call us and what their pain points are, that would be hugely valuable. The call center is one of the most important, and most frequent, customer contact points, where you can collect feedback directly.

Today, we typically rely on surveys and ask a sample of customers for feedback. I think those are Stone Age methodologies. Sometimes the questionnaires aren't good enough, or customers don't answer them very seriously.

If AI could analyze this unstructured data and summarize what's going wrong and why customers are complaining, we could respond much more effectively. I think the call center is a very promising area where AI could bring significant change — not only by improving how we respond to customers, but also by giving us much deeper customer insights.